A favourite quote I keep tacked to a bulletin board in my office reads: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.” The novelist Henry Miller said it.

As a single woman without children, I’ve been able to prioritize travel. It’s a big part of who I am. Yet, as we endure a third year in a world reshaped—restricted, still, in some ways—by the pandemic, I recognize that I lost a piece of my identity as I curtailed my travel; by necessity in the pandemic’s early days, and more recently because I just haven’t scheduled another trip yet.

It’s time. Especially as I promised myself I’d keep travelling for as long as my health and stamina would allow.

A life-threatening diagnosis

I was diagnosed with a Brain Tumour at 40 and nearly died. I grappled with what was, up to that point, an unimaginable choice: agree to open-head surgery or take my chances and leave it alone. The fact that my tumour was periodically bleeding while I battled nonstop violent headaches, dry heaving, constant hiccupping, dizziness, crushing fatigue, and paralysis in my foot and calf that put me in a leg brace all but made the choice for me.

I’ve never felt fear and despair like what enveloped me in the weeks leading up to my elective surgery, a surgery that turned into 12 hours face-down on an operating room table with my head locked in a vice as a surgical team cut into my skull. I spent multiple days in an ICU, followed by nearly a month in a brain injury rehabilitation hospital working with therapists—physical, occupational and speech—to regain what I’d temporarily lost.

What carried me through was the promise I made to myself that I would mark each anniversary of my surgery date in a different corner of our globe. I’d embrace my second chance.

Marking anniversaries

And I did. I celebrated my renewed health as I stood before world wonders. The Taj Mahal, pearly against a shadowed, wakening day. The Egyptian pyramids poking the sky under a cloudless noon sun. Cambodia’s Angor Wat temples, silhouetted against streaks of lavender and blush.

I marked one anniversary in a medieval stone villa while attending an artists’ retreat on an estate nestled in a tranquil hamlet in Tuscany’s Cetona foothills. I marked another when I ascended an Asian mountain on elephant-back to reach a temple. Another, when I floated in the Dead Sea, and another when I teetered across a suspension bridge over a plunging gorge to reach the next waterfall in the Amazon rainforest. I tented overnight in the Sahara after hours on a camel’s back, crossing glittering, silent dunes, and slept under a night sky that seemed filled with a million points of light.

I marked 10 anniversaries. On the 11th, we were well into the first year of the pandemic. Since then, I haven’t taken a trip—outside of occasional local travel through New England states near my home. Three years later, I feel this absence. I’m restless. I’m a traveller who is not travelling.

A temporary pause

My last “real” trip was to Barcelona, Spain, in February, 2020. I was there for my employer’s technology conference and it would only be weeks before Europe (and soon after, the world) shut down.

When the conference ended, I visited my nephew, Nick, who was studying in Barcelona for his college semester abroad. We drank a pitcher of sangria at a small sidewalk café before walking the city that night and taking photos of La Sagrada Familia. This otherworldly basilica looked even more surreal surrounded by monstrous cranes and bright floodlights that silhouetted its gothic splendour against an inky sky.

Weeks later, the pandemic forced the university to abruptly end the study-abroad program. Nick took four flights to reach New Hampshire, hopping from Barcelona to Montreal, New York City and then Boston, as airlines crammed hordes of panicked travellers into rapidly closing flight windows.

Everything changed in an instant and our limitless world shrank as a global population sheltered in place. The freedoms we’d all taken as our due were on temporary pause.

Soul holidays: New ways to see

Long before the pandemic and prior to my brain tumour diagnosis in 2009, my various jobs with technology companies had taken me to the cities I dreamed of as a small-town Vermont schoolgirl: New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami.

My income permitted me to scratch international travel itches, with Google searches replacing the nostalgic thumbtack-on-a-yellowed-map approach of yesteryear. Sometimes I travelled with singles groups, while other times I talked a friend into it when one of them could get time away from work or growing children. I’ve filled my digital camera and phone with photos, and my house is filled with treasures I secured from dickering with merchants in bazaars and winding alleys.

Oh, the chase! For hand-woven Moroccan carpets, Turkish lanterns, African tribal jewellery, Asian silks. One of my fondest hauls is three hash pipes I brought back from different stops in the Middle East. My hookah pipe from Palestine stands three feet (about 91 centimetres) high and raises as many eyebrows for its intended use as it does compliments for its ornate ceramic-and-glass beauty.

When I cross my house, I see at least one piece from every trip, whether they’re standing in corners, hanging on walls, covering floors or throwing light from a ceiling. They remind me of the places I’ve been that, in the words of Henry Miller, showed me new ways to see.

While roaming Djemaa el Fna in exotic Marrakech after nightfall with friends, we spun ourselves dizzy in this carnival-like square as we wheeled about to catch another sight, sound or antic that assaulted our senses. The ragged-haired tooth-puller who grinned maniacally at those passing by, reaching for elbows and brandishing a utensil similar to forceps as he targeted his next “patient” to sit in a collapsing chair by his side. The acrobat who pirouetted on a camel’s hump off to our right.

We made a wide berth around snake charmers sitting cross-legged, coaxing tranced cobras out of woven baskets with fluttering flute notes. We worked up our courage to plop down beside the bobbing reptiles; for Facebook, of course.

It’s these kinds of fun trips that I want again. Even more, I want soul holidays, like the Christmas Eve I spent in the place where the first Christmas dawned 2,000 years earlier: Bethlehem, in the bitterly divided West Bank. I’ve walked among ruins, trying to imagine civilizations at the height of dominance: Mayan, Incan, Khmer, Mughal, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Egyptian. Empires at one time, but no longer.

I prayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feet from the Stone of Anointing where it’s claimed that Jesus Christ was laid after being taken from the cross. Again, while facing the Western Wall, slipping a handwritten prayer into a crack, penciled lines on a corner I’d torn from a sales receipt for coffee. Again, when I stood outside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, breathing in the call to evening prayer as it crackled from a minaret loudspeaker and bounced through the courtyard.

Returning home each time, it felt like I’d looked through thousand-year-old windows into each country’s soul, the beauty of people and place lodging in my memory.

Travelling as a younger person, prior to my illness, fuelled my yearning to see cultures and hear languages that were different from my own, as well as my desire to meet locals and fellow travellers. Travelling after my surgery and embracing my “second time at bat” helped me experience trips through a lens of gratitude. Surviving a Bleeding Brain Tumour instilled in me a deeper appreciation for—well, quite literally, everything.

Gratitude guides me

I received a thrilling email on a grey, icy day just this past February. I’d applied to an international writing residency a few months earlier, and the program director wrote to tell me I’d been chosen to join a group of writers and poets in Prague for the month of July. The writing samples I sent as part of my application included a selection of creative non-fiction essays and a chapter from my completed memoir manuscript that I’m currently querying for agent representation.

A month in Prague! I still can’t believe my good fortune. In addition to time set aside for writing each day, our group will attend weekly workshops, hear (and give) readings, join a local art historian on city walking tours, and take weekend field trips to UNESCO World Heritage sites. After three years, my travelling dry spell from the pandemic will end.

My July trip won’t coincide with my surgery’s anniversary in October, yet it will be significant nonetheless. I’ll workshop with fellow writers and instructors on portions of my memoir manuscript that contemplates my lifetime with my bleeding brain tumour, how quickly independence can be taken and how loved ones are as vital as medical specialists in saving us.

I plan to let gratitude for overcoming my health crisis guide my upcoming experience once more.

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images: All images courtesy of author

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