"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust
Most days, I would rather be traveling. If you're reading this, chances are, you probably would too. And when I'm not traveling, which is most of the time, I'm dreaming of it. I'm plotting and planning and squeezing my whole self and all of my most golden energy into it. During longer homebound stretches, I have been known to plan imaginary trips. To spin a globe and build an entirely fictional itinerary for myself based on wherever my finger lands. But what I know, after years of doing this, is that a person can only fake-plan so many of these things before a sort of fatigue sets in. Eventually, optimism gives way to a longing too steep to navigate. The truth is we can't all be traveling, all the time. We have jobs and people and budgets and maybe animals and gardens. We have lives that are wonderfully, horribly, beautifully ordinary.
The trick for the in-between times is to figure out how to travel without traveling. And the secret sauce, I think, is in how we see things-- how we look at our most quotidian days. Walking the aisles of my local (very ordinary, very suburban) grocery store will of course never feel like wandering the streets of Sicily but if I intentionally shift the way I see, the view changes, even if just a little. Neuroscience tells us that different experiences forge new neural pathways thus, enhancing the plasticity of the brain. What's travel if not a compact, rich collection of different experiences? New people, new sounds, new foods, landscapes, languages. I live for it. That said, it's not impossible to extract shiny new bits from ordinary life. Trickier, maybe, but not impossible. I may not be able to spend large chunks of life traveling the world but I can absolutely thread my days with artful, intentional looking. I can lose myself in nearby neighborhoods I never knew existed. I can spend ten minutes in the backyard to watch planes pass overhead and imagine, in great detail, the passengers inside. I can write secret things I love about my city on small pieces of paper and leave them in public places for strangers to find. Even this practice of generating ideas feels like something-- a shortcut of sorts, a secret doorway that appears the second I let my own thinking soften and rearrange.
Every couple of Sundays, I hit the Dekalb Farmers Market-- a treasured Atlanta institution I've been regularly visiting since I first moved here in my early twenties. The second I enter the place, I am pulled into an impossible swirl of sound and color. Hundreds of international flags hang from an industrial ceiling while the people who work here, most of whom come from all over the world, tend long, narrow tables wild with varieties of produce. On my most recent visit, the place was packed and bustling. After I made my rounds, I stood still for a second, to see how much of the moment I could memorize. A woman in an electric blue head wrap pushed a cart filled and overflowing with grapefruit, just grapefruit. An older gentleman draped in crisp white cotton stood to my left and whispered something into a small bundle of fresh dill. Overhead, the flags billowed and the sound of different languages, fluid and fervent, slipped in and out of earshot. Cameras have never been allowed inside the market and for this, I have always been strangely thankful. I've grown accustomed to making these pictures in my mind, committing them to memory, scribbling them down the minute I get in the car or just letting them go. Years of traveling without traveling, before I even knew what I was doing. New eyes, over and over again and a reminder that the in-between times, they hold just as much.
-Andrea (+Bobby)
