Wandering Towards

“Not all who wander are lost.”

When I was a child, my mom would caution me incessantly against being dependent on other people. “You won’t have a crutch all your life,” she’d say, and in an ideal world, ironically, that would be true. This is not because crutches are inherently problematic. Quite the contrary. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to have an amazing support system for which I am truly grateful but there are moments of quiet solitude in which I realize that support, in its own way, renders us weak. Or at least, it renders weak those with a personality such as my own, one which, as introverted as I am, relishes, and is dependent upon, the company of others.  Weakness has never been a position that I took lightly. Living in my head more often than not, as dreamers are wont to do, I have analyzed and re-analyzed my position of self-ascribed weakness many times over. It isn’t that I am not grateful to all the support I’ve had, it’s just that I wonder, frequently, who I might have been otherwise. Who would have stood behind the door if it slid the other way? Is that person still there, waiting?  Do I want to meet her?

When I think about traveling, I think about all the ways in which my dependence on other people functions as a form of self-imposed sequestration. I’ve written quite a bit about the beauty of traveling on one’s own, but when you get right down to it, most of us travel alone yet still enjoy the pleasure of meeting others along the way. Some of us do so timidly, from the safety of gated resorts and well-oiled tours. Others prefer to rock whatever boat they get their hands on. But no matter how we choose to travel, inevitably paths cross somewhere along the way and we find ourselves encountering kindred spirits in the strangest of settings, befriending strangers or making lovers out of people we would not otherwise have done.

In the past year, as I’ve wandered between locations with no fixed agenda, I’ve thought at length about the process of finding kindred spirits with whom to travel. Chance would be a fine thing, but an ideal travel partner is more elusive than the perfect lover, and the idyllic combination of the two, more elusive still. When I’m alone, I’m nervous, a little concerned about my safety, about my ability to navigate, about my ability to meet others. But with just one other person in tow, one other person in a car, one other person with whom to share a sunset, I become invincible.  Gone is the person who fears the smallest detail, a realization I only managed to come to in the past few months as I drove up and down across my home island in the company of my cousin. Suddenly, getting lost didn’t matter. Every wrong turn was an adventure, every misdirection was a new sight to behold. And I was grateful for every opportunity, every shared moment, every new story.

There’s something to be said for getting lost with friends or family. There’s a wonderful camaraderie to the experience; stories captured, inside jokes made and re-made many times over. The last three months in Trinidad was a wonderful exercise in meeting the right kind of people with whom to be lost (though, to be fair, we rarely ended up that way, despite our navigation skills).  But there’s something better to be said for getting lost with the kind of person who makes the world disappear, who makes mists out of landscapes, and who tells stories with their eyes. That is a different kind of travel partner altogether, one with whom you can sit and take in the silence and be nothing less than content.  And in all of my searching, deliberate or otherwise, that’s the one that continues to elude me.

All that is gold does not glitter.