Dear future hubster,
earlier this summer people kept asking me where I'm going for holidays, and depending on the level of small talk-ness of the interaction, I responded in more or less detail that I don't really have a lot of leave days because it's my first year in Belgium etc etc.
But then I started thinking and had to admit that even if I had the days, I wouldn't know what to do or where to go. In the past ten years since I left my home by the (Petrusse) river, my summer holidays consisted of The European Tour: a few weeks of couchsurfing between my friends and family, living out of a suitcase that infamously exploded in many living rooms, dropping keys in mailboxes as lousy part-time lovers, forgetting personal items of a great variety, as if wanting to leave proof that I was there.
So when I finally acknowledged that it would not do any good to anybody if I didn't I took a week and did what I do best: got on a bunch of trains and covered a thousand kilometers or two, invited myself to family holidays and family homes; due to some plant-aunt duties I even managed to drop a key in a mailbox. And of course I forgot a few personal items here and there.
What I also did was feeling both a sense of comfort, a familiarity, an odd freedom, gratefulness that I get to do this, and an unexpected almost-revelation. That of course I do a European Tour, this is who I am, showing up in the life of the people I love when I can.
I also learnt a few things (what good is a trip if it doesn't come with lessons?). I learnt that the European tour does get easier in the sense that it doesn't involve jet lag or overseas travel, and 1000+ km can be covered by public transport, (something I love and will never not praise). And that the European tour does not get easier in the sense that I get waves of sadness washing over me every time I leave a place and a group of people, and that I don't want to go back to doing responsible things.
And then when I did go back to doing responsible things, I learnt that there's beauty in that too. In the the back to school mood, in the office suddenly filling up again with people old and new, and in the joy of seeing them again, the comfort of the familiar.
Something I tend to fight, something that tends to happen anyway and then I tend to be grateful for it.
