On the (Eek!) Road Again

Traveling scares me.

This might come as something of a surprise, since I tend to travel ... quite a bit. It's a rare month that I don't cross state lines. In fact, I have done less traveling in the past year than in any of the previous five, and yet I still have Silver Elite Status on a certain oft-bankrupt airline, and off the top of my head, in the past year I can name trips to the following places:

• Memphis, TN
• Massachusetts (Westboro/Marblehead for a fall wedding, just Marblehead for a spring baby)
  
• Austin, TX
• Michigan (three times)
• Chicago, IL
• Alabama (Birmingham twice, Florence once, Huntsville once, Daphne once)
• Louisiana (New Orleans once, Monroe once, Baton Rouge once)
• The Secret Trip (long story)
  
• Mississippi's Gulf Coast (three times)
• Washington DC
• Georgia (Macon once, Atlanta once)
• Oxford, MS

(Amazingly, all of those trips were either for work or scheduled over a weekend/holiday weekend. I haven't taken an actual vacation since Costa Rica 2005. Haven't used a single "vacation day" from work since moving back down here in April 2007. I know - I'm a total idiot on that front.)

So it's pretty clear that even in a "light" travel year, I do a lot of traveling. And literally every time I travel, I get nervous. I clean my house before I leave, so that if God forbid something happens while I'm gone - someone needs to go pick something up from my house to bring me to the hospital while I recover from a nasty car crash, say - I won't have left a mess. I try to make sure that the last interaction I had with my closest people was positive. (Traveling while in a tiff with someone is not always avoidable, but I do what I can.) I always make sure to have plenty scheduled for when I get back, so that I'm subtly reassuring and reminding myself that the plan is, in fact, to make it back safe and sound.

--As I write this, it sure does sound paranoid. It's all more subtle than it sounds -- but the point is, there is some little voice of warning chiming away in a corner of my mind, a little edge of fear tracing itself around me as I prepare for the next trip. Always that little lurch in my stomach when I hit the road, when the plane takes off, when I navigate the unfamiliar neighborhood. Especially when I travel alone, which is most often the case.

Is it some remnant of something? In my own past - or, in some larger communal past? Could well be that the fear is by design. Protective, some ingrained type of self-preservation. After all, just a few generations ago, traveling was far rarer than it is today. It was common for people to never leave their own hometown, let alone state or country... let alone dozens of times a year. On some deep, patterned level, is there a fear of leaving the familiar and venturing into the unknown, with all the risks of highway bandits and choppy seas along the way?

Maybe. I'll probably never know... but the more important realization is this: I still travel. I'm scared every time, but it doesn't stop me from booking the next ticket or planning the next road trip. Perhaps the lesson is not that I need to get over my fear of travel - but that in some other areas of my life, I need to use my Nervous Frequent Flier status as a reference point. Just because I fear something doesn't mean I should avoid it. At the end of the day... traveling might be a risk, but it's one I'll keep on taking. It's something I want in my life.

Knowing that... perhaps I should aim for Silver Elite Status on a few of the other items on my List of Scary Things.

PS I know I promised some of my loyal readers that this week would be a photo-essay about Sofia's recent haircutting experience. However, I'm at a hotel, out of town, without my camera-transferring-cords... so I can't upload the photos. Thus, this will be a double Bethweek week. I'll post the Sof photos once I'm back home, safe and sound.