In the Balkans, it is said, that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you have been born under a "lilac bleeding star". It must have been very bright the night I was born, for I have always wanted to know what was down the road, around the corner, at the next bus or train stop or on the other side of the ocean.
And so I find it hard to understand the fear some people have to cross over their thresholds and explore the world they say they want to see someday. Women, most frequently, are the ones that respond to my travel tales by saying "I could never go on my own, but I do want to travel someday." Well, unless they get moving now, that day may never come. As a nurse working in long term care and residential care facilities, I hear the regrets from those who never got around to acting on their travel dreams. In talking with them, I have learned that they have not developed the basic skills that would give them the confidence to start traveling, to move beyond their immediate community and workplace.
Those basic skills can be learned, and once mastered provide the confidence to start traveling. A course I have taught for a community adult education program, "Travel-Dream to Reality" offered information on discovering what was keeping one at home, how to find the information needed to learn the basic travel skills for that first trip and then to discover why one journey leads to another.
My question at the end of the course? When you are home alone would you rather think about the travels you never got around to for whatever reasons or would you like to open the scrapbooks holding the photographs, the maps, the postcards from all the trips you did take?
I'm reminded of a story a family member of one of the residents I have cared for told me. "My aunt was always taking trips. She told me if she ever had to live in a nursing home, forget the recliner. She wanted an airplane seat with a seatbelt and all her travel scrapbooks next to her bed. Every day, they could get her into the airliner seat, fasten the seatbelt and hand her a scrapbook and she would be content."
Travel scrapbooks and journals were the choices made by the women taking the travel course I was teaching, but one has to move beyond the comfort of their homes to gather the material to document the journey.
Future postings on this blog will offer information on how to fill those travel scrapbooks, how to overcome the fears of traveling and how to prepare for trips lasting just a few hours or for journeys lasting weeks and months.
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