The apprehension of the unknown in travel 4

The apprehension creeps in.

July 2017

Faced with the impending finality of giving up the apartment that has become my comfortable home over the past year, I am once again feeling the constriction in my throat and bouts of fear of what is to come. I am again starting to wonder if I’m crazy and if I should just stay comfortably where I am.

The reality starts to hit me whenever I leave “home” for the unknown. Where am I going to stay? Will I be invited into peoples homes? Will I be safe? Am I crazy for doing this?

For the most part on this blog, I have shown you the places I have been and they are indeed exciting. If I have invoked your wonderlust or wanderlust, then I have done a good job of showing you how exciting travel can be. However, I’m not sure whether I have shown you the other side, the uncertainty of it. If I haven’t, I owe it to you to do so. The excitement and adventure of traveling is not without this other side, the bad what-if or the worry. My friends and people that I meet on the road tell me that I’m gutsy or brave or amazing or other words like that. But that’s not necessarily the case. All I am is someone who has gotten past the apprehension.

I have been rereading the journals of my travels when I was 27 years old. Then too, mixed into the excitement of who I met in what I did and where I went, there were also the apprehensive parts.

The truth is there is always apprehension. I do have to be one step ahead of myself at all times, figuring out where I’m going to stay, and how am I going to get there. This is not easy. It is stressful.

That’s me, holding fire!

But I also have to remind myself that when I had an apartment of my own and was near my supportive family, I still had apprehensions. There was no perfect “the good old days.” Even when loving parents are taking care of us and tucking us in at night, there are apprehensions in our young lives. So I remind myself of that and I remind myself that, for me, the particular apprehensions I’m bringing into my life are worth it.

Today, when I went to Facebook to check out my friends, there was a five-year-old memory of when I had gone to the festival a fire in the Najapa, El Salvador. I remember that very very well. It was scary because of the fire — but it was also exciting. And any other day that I look at photos of my travels, I experience that same reminder. The reminder that when I’m out on the road, the whole world is open for me.