We’ve all been there. We are sitting at the dentist’s, or in the clinic, or waiting for our dog to get his rabies shot.
We see the haphazard stack of magazines sprawled out across the coffee-stained end table and begin casually rifling through them. Vogue, Men’s Health, Golf, Entertainment Weekly, Bon Appétit…Travel.
Immediately, you pick up the travel magazine and are immersed. Spectacular weekend jaunts to the heart of Santorini, Greece. Romantic getaways to Naples. Awe-inspiring food haunts for the world’s best rice and beans (hey, don’t knock it – that stuff is addictively good).
You start to envision yourself going to these locations, experiencing everything in the same manner the magazine depicts it. The luscious food, the spacious villa, the astonishing view.
Maybe you even start creating little scenarios in your mind – biking down a quiet country road, taking a long walk down the coast of the Mediterranean, drinking coffee at a lively bistro with great outdoor seating.
Once these scenarios have been formed, you start to add spice and variety to them. Who will you meet? A dashing and impeccable young waiter who lets you spend way too long looking at the dessert menu? A lone surfer, winsome and beguiling in her graceful strength?
Will you speak to them? Will your courage abandon you and have you left with nothing but the deepest of “what ifs”?
These days and people and lives you imagine touching…they are happening, but only in your mind. If you were to go, who is to say you would experience life as you had imagined? If you don’t, what will you be missing?
When we see these images and picture ourselves there, rather than here (wherever that may be), a strange desire overcomes us. A tugging, a longing, an irresistible pull. Somehow simultaneously inexplicable and utterly understandable.
For how can we miss a place unknowable to us? How can we fall in love with a part of the world thousands of miles from where we are, and thousands of miles from where we have been?
Is it the idea of a place, the idea of a feeling, that we long for, or even crave? Is it the idea of what life has the potential to be, or what we ourselves could be?
Somehow, I think a lot of us end up thinking that we are our best selves when we are away from home. It’s a small but significant way to reinvent what might be the stuffy, the familiar. But why do we feel the need to get away?
I have no idea. But living in one of the busiest and most diverse cities in the world does require an occasional getaway, whether it be to the suburbs of Long Island to the utter rurality of upstate New York.
And yes, when I’m at the doctor’s office waiting to get my flu shot, I’ll look at the travel magazines (or food magazines). And I’ll be filled with nostalgia over the bustling food scene in Copenhagen or with longing for chicken and waffles in San Francisco.
I think it is possible to miss places you’ve never been; the same way you can love someone you’ve never met or crave foods you have never tasted. I don’t know why this is.
Maybe it’s the fear of not living up to your mind’s expectations that will keep us away. Or maybe, it will provide the motivation for us to go.
