On Leaving and Returning: The Peculiarities of Traveling

The acts of leaving and returning on a journey often serve as convenient bookends to our travels in our minds but on closer inspection largely come to define our traveling experiences.

Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash

As travelers, we are perpetual motion machines, in a constant state of flux between leaving and returning. From a bird’s eye view, it appears as though we cannot make up our minds on where to stay put, always frantically moving to and fro. An objective observer of this strange and amusing behavior of ours might be fo…