Prone to wander

Finding stillness in a nomadic life

Me in Greece in May 2023

England. The place I was born and grew up and still live in, on and off. Since the start of the millennium I’ve spent, in total, around twelve years living or travelling elsewhere.

Ireland, New Zealand, Spain. The places I’ve lived. Ireland for four and a half years, New Zealand for three years and Spain for six months.

Australia, Canada, Cook Islands, Fiji, Portugal, Scotland. The places I’ve stayed in/travelled in for periods of two months or longer. I’ve also been to Australia twice, and Scotland countless times.

Cyprus, France, Greece, Kefalonia, Italy, Malaysia, Turkey, Wales. Places I’ve returned to more than once, staying for anything from a week to a couple of months.

Andorra, Belgium, Cambodia, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Ibiza, India, Israel, Lesvos, Majorca, Mauritius, Monaco, Norway, Skiathos, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Tenerife, Thailand, Tonga. Places I’ve been to once for periods ranging from three days to a month.

“So what,” is probably what you’re thinking right now! And I get that as it’s something I have been wondering about all the travelling I’ve done. About going and living in countries other than the one I was born in. Something I will do again soon as my husband and I simply cannot afford to live in the UK unless we stop following our hearts and return to the rat race we escaped twelve years ago. That isn’t going to happen — there is no going back.

But what was all this travel for? What did it show me? What did I learn? How did it help me, or help others? Why did I feel compelled to do it? I don’t have all the answers but I do know that some of my earliest memories are connected with the feeling of wanting to be elsewhere. I grew up surrounded by anger and violence and I wanted to be far away.

Hiding in my bedroom in my chaotic home pouring over atlases and aching to be transported by a magic carpet to these far away places with names I couldn’t even say. What would the people be like there? How did they speak? What did they wear? What did they eat? Would they fight and hit and shout and smash things all the time? Did mothers get their child out of bed in the middle of the night and leave, then come back again the next day, over and over again?

I don’t know how old I was, probably only three or four, but I have a memory of being in a huge crowd on my granddad’s shoulders, meeting my aunt off a boat when she returned from a year in Australia. She’d been staying with distant relatives that went out there as “Ten Pound Poms”. She brought back a map of the country on a tea towel for her mum, my nana, who hung it on the wall in the front room. I stayed at my nana and granddad’s house a lot and I would sit and stare at the tea towel map of this big island with its big rock, boomerangs, koalas and kangaroos, and want more than anything to go there too.

In primary school, a theatre company came and performed a show about the legend behind the blue willow pattern that my nana had on her tea cups and plates. I was transfixed and it sparked a lifelong fascination with Chinese culture. Despite this fascination, I haven’t been to China. Yet.

Image from Adobe Stock

My granddad was a security guard at Heathrow Airport and things were very different in the 1970s so he would take me there and show me around the planes. I went on Concorde — not in the air just on the runway — and remember being strapped in the seat and given a bottle of coke. Bubbles fizzing in my nose, dreaming about being fired through the air to New York, the exciting city of the movies.

When I went to secondary school, I realised I lived in a place where people were always going somewhere else. I come from Reading in Berkshire, a commuter town just under 40 miles from central London where hordes of people travel into and out of the city every day. It is only 30 miles from Heathrow and planes were flying overhead constantly. It has one of the largest train stations in the country and you can get connections to everywhere in the UK from there. I worked at the station for four years when I was in my late teens and early twenties, first on the call centre then in the ticket office. Everybody was always going somewhere else.

Since I was in my twenties, I have always been going somewhere else too. Even when I am living back in England, like I am at the moment, I am thinking about or planning where I’m going next. Greece leaving a month today and staying there for a month, is the answer to that at the moment.

Why do I keep wanting to do this? What drives me to keep going elsewhere? I don’t know but I do know there has never been any stillness in my life.

By the time I was fourteen, I had lived in seven different houses. When I was in my early thirties my mother blurted out one day that I had been given up for adoption when I was a few days old. She said this as we were walking across a carpark on our way to a restaurant when her and my stepfather visited us in Lancaster, a town in northern England where we lived for just over a year. But apparently there was a get out clause and after a few weeks they went and got me back. Who knows how much truth there is in that story. My family life was filled with lies and it became impossible to tell in the end what was truth, half truth, or no truth at all. But if it is true, that makes it eight houses.

In the 26 years we’ve been together, as well as all the housesitting and travelling we’ve done, my husband and I have lived in 22 different houses, on a canal narrowboat, and spent one summer living in a yurt.

Our cat, Rusty, on the canalboat we bought, fitted out and travelled the UK waterways on for 9 months in 2013-14

What has all this travel and moving about taught me?

That everyone everywhere just wants the same things: love, security, peace and joy.

That everyone everywhere feels as if the divisions created between us all are getting wider.

That everyone everywhere is the same.

It has made me understand fully that we are all in this together, that we are not separate no matter how many miles there may be between the places we call home. No matter how many differences we are led to believe there are between us because of our nationality, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, bank balance or job title.

Since developing a regular reading habit of the Tao Te Ching I come back to this chapter in the Stephen Mitchell translation often:

80
If a country is governed wisely,
its inhabitants will be content.
They enjoy the labor of their hands
and don't waste time inventing
labor-saving machines.
Since they dearly love their homes,
they aren't interested in travel.
There may be a few wagons and boats,
but these don't go anywhere.
There may be an arsenal of weapons,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy their food,
take pleasure in being with their families,
spend weekends working in their gardens,
delight in the doings of the neighborhood.
And even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.

The UK hasn’t been governed wisely in my lifetime. It has been using its weapons whenever it feels like its financial interests may be in jeopardy and whenever it wants something that someone else has. There has been strikes and riots, bombs going off, and a lot of discord, ever since I was a little girl. My family didn’t enjoy being together, and nor did many of the other families I knew, and everyone around me was always going somewhere else.

So maybe this yearning to go explore is because of that. Or maybe I am just prone to wander. I do love to experience new places, different cultures, and feel very far removed from a normal, everyday life.

So then I come back to what Eckhart Tolle said in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose:

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”

So in that case, it’s all happening because it’s meant to and I should stop overthinking it and just accept and enjoy what it brings. Because it’s helping me grow in the way I need to so I can be a kinder, happier, more openminded and empathetic me. It’s helping me to be a better writer able to show more compassion and understanding to all of the characters I write, no matter what they do and say.

And even though I’ve never been still for long in the physical world, the journey I’ve been on has led me to a great stillness in my inner world that goes with me everywhere, all of the time.

What about you? Do you move about and travel a lot, or have you been in one place for a very long time? Or something in between? How has your experience changed you?

With love,

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