Anxious others

I don’t know if I was ever a planner of trips; I like to blame my aversion to it on my time in South Africa though. Rural South Africa at that. A place where the best laid plans yielded results not particularly different than no plans at all. Transportation failed, reservations were ignored, business hours deemed irrelevant. I learned to improvise. More importantly, I learned to laugh while improvising. The alternative was much less joyful. I think I began to associate joy with a lack of a cohesive plan, plus there was always an air of surprise to the things I did. Who doesn’t love a surprise?

My current narrative, crafted over the last 15, almost 20 years, is that I learned not to spend energy on something that probably wouldn’t come to fruition. Although, if I really think about it, I have a similar philosophy about deadlines. I could be smart and work on project well in advance of their due dates, but why. That philosophy was part of the reason journalism was a good (if fleeting) fit for me. You spend so much time waiting -hurry up and wait. It worked to my strengths. The flurry of activity when something new is about to happen, and then a lull of navel gazing, and then the slightly nauseating fatigue associated with worry as the deadline approached.

The thing is, I don’t know if I am built to work under deadline or if I simply trained myself into it, either way, I usually trade the turtle’s philosophy of slow and steady for the hare’s procrastination. I’m willing to suffer the consequences for the freedom it provides.

But for some reason my foot loose attitude disturbs other people. People who have nothing to do with the consequences I’ll face. I see it most when I am preparing for a trip. I don’t usually have much angst about preparing for a trip, even to a new country. It isn’t that I don’t worry at all, it isn’t that I don’t know things can go wrong. Actually I assume that something will happen. Something unplanned, some degree of unpleasantness. I just don’t think I can control whatever that unpleasant thing is with additional planning. I also recognize that whatever happens, however horrible in the moment, will probably yield an amazing story after the fact.

In search of the source of the Blue Nile

But I digress…

Other people insert their apprehension into my preparations. It is the oddest reality. 

Friends check up on my planning. Do I have a hotel room? Do I have an itinerary? Have I packed?

I’ve trained my mother over the years. She’s stopped asking me about packing until my trip is literally within a day or two. I don’t doubt that she wants to ask me a week before she actually does- but she already knows the answer. The answer is always “no”.

Peace Corps, 1999, was the last time I packed in advance. And truthfully, even that doesn’t really count. I spent several weeks piling things in the living room – ever higher. Finally, my best friend at the time, came over and looked me in the eyes and asked, “do you need help?”. I almost burst into tears, I was so grateful. I had no idea how to even begin.

She kneeled down beside the pile, held one thing up after the other to see if I wanted to include it and folded it all neatly into my suitcase. I doubt she remembers that. We aren’t friends anymore. But it was a kind and needed gesture. When she was finished I had a suitcase and my father’s Air Force duffle bag loaded with clothes. 

Of course, it was my first trip and I was only thinking about things fitting into a bag not how much the bag weighed. The night before I was actually departing, I had to repack the whole lot, a new pile of things that were discarded and left behind because the whole thing was too heavy to carry.

Ever since then I’ve been a last minute packer. The night before I left for Liberia I had all of my stuff strewn across my sister’s living room floor, her middle daughter asleep across my lap.

Packing at the last minute doesn’t make me anxious. I’ve learned over the years of living in resource poor areas, that although it is sometimes a pain, it is always possible to find what I have forgotten, or at least a reasonable replacement (as long as I have my passport, ticket, and cash/credit card/ATM card). And so I don’t have much angst. 

My calm doesn’t stop other people from having anxiety for me. Wanting me to plan when planning just isn’t my thing. And by thing, I mean it isn’t my preferred method of travel– not that I am unable to do it. When my dad and I went to Peru last year, he was very clear that the planning was on me. And I did. I created a spreadsheet with details about times and money and contact information. I had our days accounted for and possible activities. I handed him his copy and he summarily grinned, folded it, and I never saw it again. He would simply ask me what we were doing next. I guess I got the anti-planning thing honest.

Ultimately, not planning is what calms me down. I have friends and the plan is their balm. The plan is their assurance that things will be ok. But for me, planning is my every day. Planning is my work. Planning is real life. Vacation is a chance to get away from that. To deviate from my script and see what happens. Sometimes that means I spend all day eating a tajine with a shopkeeper in Casablanca after searching out an actual piece of Sandalwood, sometimes that means trudging shin deep through mud and then floating on a papyrus canoe in search of the source of the Blue Nile. And sometimes it means I am stuck, and a little panicked, looking for a way to the Guatemalan village where my language school is located. 

I have learned to take it as it comes…even if no one else seems to appreciate my approach.