"What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare"
Leisure, William Henry Davies
You would think, of course, that travelling for a year is all about having time to stand and stare. After all, we are not working? And what does anyone fill their time with if not work?
I think I would like to dispel a myth. I'm not on a 'poor us we have the terrible misfortune to be travelling' rant. On the contrary I am acutely aware of how incredibly lucky we are.
It's just that I would like to point out that it's not the same as 'having all the time in the world'.
I made the same assumption before we left.
"Probably I will finish Neville and start the new novel while we are away", I said, "and we'll have loads of time so I will learn yoga online. Oh and blog... Maybe I could turn the blogs into a book. And make gifts for people out of local materials...and...and...and..."
The reality is that I am, at least in the two days that sparked this blog, feeling the pressure. I am struggling to keep up with blog entries and fill in New Zealand, which is currently a huge gap because I didn't have time to write down the experiences there because I was too busy, well, having the experiences. I have to re edit Neville but I don't know when I will fit it in, even with my six am starts. And really I should be preparing to try to get him published, either self or otherwise but I definitely have no time to squeeze that in...
If you are incredulous, sure, as I was, that travelling would be replete with time because we wouldn't be working, think about retired people. They don't work, but I know a few and they definitely get busy! There is an attitude to work in the west in particular that demonises it. Work is the only reason we can't do anything we want, is a necessary evil that ties up our lives so they are unfulfilled and empty.
I have talked before about the problem of work and people assuming the best thing about this trip is that we get out of going to it. I have already ranted about work being part of life and the responsibility we have to ourselves to do anything possible to enjoy our work, rather than carving a work shaped misery gap out of our lives and saying 'of course I cry every Sunday in dread of Monday. That's what work is...'
So taking that aspect out of it, it is not true that without work you would have all the time in the world. You would have the same amount of time, and even more importantly, the same amount of energy to spread over the things you would chose to do in your day.
Travelling is pretty much your replacement job. You could never conscience simply sitting in a country and not going out to see it, and so each day you are going to do something in that country. In our case we are travelling relatively slowly, compared to others who are doing it for less time overall. So we do have days where we don't do as much. But we are always HERE. Wherever 'here' is. And being 'here' is largely unfamiliar. We very rarely have parts of our day which we can do on autopilot. Everything's new.
It is wonderful, exhilarating, life affirming and beautiful.
It's also tiring. The reason I squeeze Neville the novel into the early hours of the morning, is because I have to fit other things into the day. I squeeze blog writing into basically any brief pause in the day - scribbling while I drink water or coffee, planning in my head on journeys or if we pause at the top of hills or mountains, and we both suffer from the same need to somehow unwind and relax at the end of the day.
When you travel, you are still human. You still get tired and long to watch a film or read a book in the evenings. And you still squeeze things in, just the same as at home. Maybe we have a little more personal choice about our 'working' hours, (though often the country we are in has no small say in that), but we have the same number of them, the same finiteness of hours in the day.
All of which is building up to say that in these two days, M and I have a mini 'crash'. I am feeling hassled and beginning to see blogs and Neville in much the same way as I have just complained that people view work. M is tired and, by Saturday, has come down with what turns out to be a 24 hour mild flu bug. We are both, though we haven't quite admitted it, started to look at Bolivia through tired eyes, not really taking it in, not finding it in ourselves to have an emotional reaction to what we are seeing. It feels a little like 'gallery fatigue', we have seen so much that now we look at new pictures with hollow eyes. We need to go to the gallery canteen and get a coffee.
So we take a break. Somehow both of us are a little releived that M's flu will keep us both indoors for a couple of days. (Because I have to look after him, obviously!) We put ourselves on the sofa, and permit ourselves, for two days, to temporarily ignore Bolivia. In the hope that by doing so we will repair our eyes and be able to rush out of our door into it on Monday, with newly appreciative, and open minds.
As for the time to stand and stare, I think that's still something to work on. Both here and at home. How often do we really stop and look, without an internal monologue, listing all the petty tasks we should do when we get moving again?
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