Time + Travel
Me in garudasana (eagle pose) on Tokoriki Island, Fiji.
(The great snorkeling mentioned in the Fiji travel log is just over my left shoulder.)
This week’s blog is deeply tied to my love of travel and what travel can teach us about ourselves and the collective.
Specifically, I recently added two countries to my travel section, which was a fun trip down memory lane. You can see some photos and core memories of Vanuatu and Fiji by clicking those links. We traveled there in summer of 2019, well before the first case of COVID-19 was known - we were blissfully unaware, all of us, in August 2019, how much our lives would change in six months. It was also one of our last big trips before a move from Oakland back to New Orleans - we were intentionally planning a change to our lives.
This brings me to my topic of this week - nostalgia and what looking back can do for us. Are you someone that looks at old photos, re-lives past conversations, reads journal entries from the past you have written or emails or cards people have sent you? As a yoga teacher, there is so much talk of the present - staying present, being present, connecting to what is right here and now. I do believe in the power of that practice, especially when our modern world is so 1)distracting and 2)future-focused. It can be a nice, and grounding, opportunity to turn the mind’s attention to a single thing that is alive and real in this moment.
And - our brains are made to prepare for the future and remember the past, right? I also believe that so much of what we see with social justice, human rights and environmental rights movements and progress has to do with looking at history - that Ghanaian idea of sankofa - looking back to move forward. The past can tell us a lot about how we got where we are, now. And it can offer lessons and stories from the past to help us plan for the future.
I find looking back at photos a great way to remember the past, to keep it alive. Whether it’s photos of loved ones no longer with us, physically, or remembering who we were as children, photos are sacred. I’ve been using the travel section of this site to do just that with travel - remember the amazing places and people I’ve been to and met across this vast world. Most of my travel memories, too, in the past nearly 20 years have been with my husband. He’s my favorite travel partner, and we use travel to connect. It’s a shared love -the act of travel and adventure - and a shared goal - to see as much as we can in this lifetime (caveat: without putting ourselves in known, material danger). Even the planning and anticipation of travel, that forward thinking bit is a connection point. We spent about a year planning our six week honeymoon in 2017, in lieu of planning for a big wedding. It was such a fun adventure - we had a big white board and would plan weekly meetings. I look back on that planning, anticipation, and those six weeks so fondly.
What are some photos or memories that you find yourself returning to again and again? Or have those shifted over the years? I have the comments turned on to invite anyone to share with kindness and openness.
