Packing for Mongolia, for which I leave on Monday. Travel anxiety has begun to set in. Am I taking too much, am I not taking enough, am I taking all the wrong things, I don’t have enough clothes for hot/cold/rainy/dry situations, do I have enough shampoo/vitamins/dramamine…
And of course what it’s really all about is, I’m going to the OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD FOR PETE’S SAKE! And it’s not even really about that, either. We’ve talked about this before on this blog and some of you were good enough to share your own travel anxieties. It’s about, I’m stepping so far outside my comfort zone I can’t even see it from here. The packing madness, the one more shirt, the summer socks and winter socks, the extra moisturizer just in case — it’s all about taking my comfort zone with me.
I don’t do this any more when I go to Europe, though I used to, or when I travel in the US. I’m famous for how lightly I pack. Objectively, what I’m packing for Mongolia is pretty light, too, for, um, Mongolia. But even going to Boston, I get this same exiled feeling, which is at the heart of the matter. What do you MEAN I can’t stay here? Right smack 100% in the middle of my comfort zone? Where I know how things happen, how they work. I have to LEAVE? Whose idea was this?
Oh.
More on this later — excuse me now, I have to go make another list.
(I’ll finish the quote in the title in my Sunday night post before I leave.)
I don’t travel as much as you do but I tend to ask the question, “What will the consequences be of forgetting ‘x’?”
From that perspective the list of things worth worrying about becomes pretty short.
Again, from someone who hasn’t been to Mongolia.