SED Artist

I think that there is a halfway point to your travels which isn’t just on your calendar. Your time away is a balance, and it shifts once you get to the middle. I think there are multiple demonstrations of this, some of which I came to notice only in the last week.

Firstly, it seems you become way more susceptible to nostalgic feelings about home. As you feel more comfortable in and around your new surroundings, you also begin to observe the ways in which the country you’re in and the country you’re from, resemble each other.

Scenes and sounds combine into scents that you subconsciously yearn for, and whether you’re pulling home into here or memorising senses to bring ‘here’ back to home, I don’t quite know. Maybe, it’s a little bit of both. I guess we do that with most things, our lives are hopefully a combination of all the things we love and enjoy.

It’s a good thing actually, to think of home during your absence from it. It’s one of those happy realisations where you truly appreciate the things you always took for granted. I think that noticing ‘home’ in your new surrounding environment, also pushes you to notice it in the people you meet. Their traits and the traits of your friends and loved ones back home will become all too similar, although I’m not quite sure if that’s something we actively seek out or subconsciously remark. Personally, I would like to think we seek these things out, finding the places and people that you know you’ll love. Maybe they, in turn, have a way of pulling you towards them too, associating each other with places and people we already know and love.

Secondly, I have come to notice how heavily expected it is of travellers to meet people, constantly. What’s crucial, and something you most likely learn later on, or in my case, at the halfway point, is how to ‘social budget’. Travelling can be draining enough, and it’s not always just fun, sun and doing nothing. During my stay on Koh Rong, I met a group of French people with whom I felt so comfortable with. Like in the first paragraph, I noticed such great traits of home in them that it felt really easy. Meeting people who make you feel comfortable can really rejuvenate you and is so different to being constantly surrounded by new people whom you don’t actually feel connected to. That’s ‘social budgeting’, pouring more into those you feel better around. It seeks logical really but isn’t always that easy.

Meeting people you have a ‘coup de coeur’ with can be bittersweet though. Bearing in mind you’re meeting people from all around the globe, or even from the other side of the country, it’s a little heartbreaking knowing you’re not going to see them often, maybe even not ever again. So much goes to say for enjoying your time with them in the present moment, of course, but it’s not easy, leaving people you know you could have a great friendship with.

Lucky for us, it’s so easy to remain connected nowadays, and it’s most likely that we’ll come home to far too many new instagram friends, some of whom you just met once and didn’t even really like that much.

Thirdly, I’ve noticed that the Halfway Home point can suggest a slight surge in existential turmoil. There are pressures and responsibilities back home which resemble the doomed choices of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree from The Bell Jar. Plath sits in the crotch of a fig tree watching branches and figs disperse around her, a representation of all the lives she could lead, should she dedicate herself to one. Naturally, and ambitiously, she wants all of them and cannot bring herself to choose for fear of missing out on the others. As she struggles with her indecision, the figs fall off the branches and shrivel, brown, at her feet. Feat of missing out actually causes her end up with nothing at all. Really, it’s tragic, but, over dramatically, rather relatable.

The reason I mention Mrs Plath here is because I’ve noticed that a lot of people use travelling as a sort of transition period in their lives. This doesn’t apply to everyone of course. As a consequence though, and as the natural weight of the balance goes, once you traverse halfway, you’re sliding down towards what awaits you on the other side. Mainly, that tends to be uncertainty. Maybe a new job, a new home, maybe new friends or new opportunities. None of these things are bad, but they all involve a certain change, and we all know how we tend to react to that (fyi it tends to be pretty scary, even amidst great excitement).

Excitement and fear are the same thing really, or in my mind at least. They exist in the same continuum like the small silver balls in Newton’s cradle. One bangs into the other, giving it swing, causing it to bang back into the one that caused it to swing in the first place. Without one, the other cannot truly be experienced to the fullest. Without the fear, would it really be all that exciting ?

Although this seems a little random, I have a point. I think travelling is a big step for a lot of people, although it doesn’t seem that scary in itself, the act of creating routine in the unsettled seems unnatural and uncomfortable. For this reason we search for those things that ground us to times, places and people in which stability is a strong factor. The Halfway Home point appears here as a balance because of the way that pressures are applied to our choices regarding the real world’, which ‘travelling’ is rarely seen to belong to. The first half is the ascent into exciting newness with little responsibility, and the second half is the gentle ascent back into reality. Even within newfound existential turmoil, the second half presents itself as better half. It is here that you realise the weight (or lightness) of your absence (or your presence, depending on how you see it). You learn to socially budget and you’ve most likely learnt the parts of travelling you enjoy the most, hopefully prioritising those. In a positive light, it also becomes the time when you anxiously looked forward to what’s ahead, and start making bullet point lists of potential jobs and dreams.

So, to conclude, I’m Halfway Home. Not good, not bad, just halfway home; halfway new, halfway old, etcetera.