Travelling for me has always been as much about leaving somewhere as about going somewhere. When you combine in the same body a strong need for rootedness with a strong pull to explore new places and change, life can end up being little more than an oddly dissatisfying push-and-pull game if you don’t get to grips with the competing urges and figure out what they’re really all about. The combination of those two opposing forces often manifests itself in a desire not only to visit places I love, but wanting to live in them. Because I need to know those places in the way that you only ever can if you live in them, wake in them every day, grow and change with their seasons, take their influences inside you until those places are a part of you and you in some way belong to them. Living in a large number of places means that there are bits of me scattered around quite a few countries and quite a few places in some of those countries, and I carry some of the energies of those landscapes with me too, wherever I go.
There have really only been two times in this often peripatetic lifestyle when I’ve been completely sure that my feet were in the right place. Once in the mid-90s when I lived in Connemara, and the second time here, in an oddly similar culture and landscape in the Outer Hebrides. Leaving Connemara was a necessity for all kinds of personal reasons, otherwise I suspect I might still be there. And I hope never to leave here.
I know I’m in the right place not only because of how I feel when I’m here, but how I feel when I’m away. If you belong to a place then in some strong sense, when you go away you never completely leave it. A brief trip to Inverness this week confirmed that much: in a crowded room full of around 100 chattering people, some of whom I knew and was happy to see again, the sense of unreality was the most real thing about the experience. It wasn’t a case of daydreaming, of thinking about the sea and the mountains that border this croft. It was simply that the situation, the location, the subject of the meeting, and more - none of it made very much sense. And neither did the streets of Inverness, filled to the brim (in spite of the ‘economic downturn’) with people haunting shops for the many ‘bargains’ that seem to be available right now, and walking away with so many things that I very much doubt they really need. It was only on the long windy, rainy drive back to Uig on Skye that the world began to come back into focus. Only on the ferry to Tarbert in heavily rolling seas in what the captain called ‘severe gales’ that the grainy black and white world started to fade back into colour. And only on the treacherous drive home through Harris and South Lewis that whatever odd internal compass I carry inside me felt that it was pointing in the right direction and steadied its searching flicker.
Sharon
I was recently up in breanish to look at croft for sale and briefly met your husband. I fully understand your love for this magical place I only hope to be able to persue my dream .
Best of luck with it!
Sharon, your motivations and reactions to ‘travel’ seem to correspond almost exactly with my own. Perhaps it is a pattern that is particularly strongly associated with being an ‘islander-by-choice’, though I know many native islanders have a similar perspective and experience. Lack of money for travel is no doubt a factor, but for me the repeated disappointment I experience from being elsewhere, and the ever-growing sense of attachment – rootedness, even – to life here, means that the wanderlust that has driven my life for so many years is ebbing away: I just know I’ll end up feeling the whole exercise was a waste of money, time, and opportunity to get on with life here. That said, felt much the same on a visit last summer to your island – Lewis! The exception to this is the desire to visit daughters in west Wales and in the Basque country.
Like your Wales and Basque possibilities, I think there are some places I could still enjoy visiting if I had to or was asked to … the difference I suppose is that I wouldn’t choose to travel just for travel’s sake. What I for sure can’t seem to do well any more is cities, even though I’ve lived in them. All that concrete feels surreal and wrong! – and the noise just outrageous. On the other hand, two trips to the south of England for festivals etc earlier this year, to beautiful locations in the country, still felt wrong. There was still a sense of being hemmed in by the not distant-enough cities. Something about being on a land edge here too, I think …