Stopovers and Stopping
It’s been a bit of a thing venturing out again on long haul flights. The world has opened up again, the pandemic has continued but the global apathy has allowed a strange transition back to what was normal.
Three years of working in healthcare and watching the world from afar has led to a trepidation about heading out there again. Borders are easy to cross, and airports are busy. People shuffle from country to country, getting back to business.
I’m heading back over to the UK, via Singapore where I had two days to break up the trip. Although it has been quite some years since I travelled, I have the memories of a direct flight to the other hemisphere etched permanently in my mind. Or in my circadian rhythm memory. This will be an experiment in whether breaking up the trip and setting the clock with melatonin and gradual shifting serves me at the other end.
There are two schools of thought, one is to get to the destination as fast as possible and struggle through the eventual jet lag. The other is to take your time and pace it. A kind of hare and the tortoise approach to global travel.
My time in Singapore was pretty uneventful and I was happy with that. I had an ambivalence about WiFi access on the plane; there was something alluring about being somewhere in the sky where emails couldn’t ping and I’d have no ability to scroll, looking for ways to feel like others had a more interesting life than me, despite me heading off on a four week journey I have planned to perfection and worked hard to create. Somehow other bright and shiny things on other people’s feeds can still look appealing until you remember you are looking whilst on a long haul flight to one of the most amazing cities in the world. I’m slowly learning that gratitude is a better practice than envy every time.
Anyway, purposefully slowing down and reading a book by the pool was my modus operandi. No sight seeing for me, a deliberate strategy to force myself to slow down and turn my attention to what was ahead of me, rather than what was going on in my real world in Oz. I struggle with turning off and saying no as much as I struggle with jet lag. As much as I try and work on both, there is an acceptance that it is how I am biologically orientated, and as much as I have worked on fighting both, its time to accept it.
This next month is as much of a project as it is a holiday. It’s a month to focus on my writing and amass some words on a page before heading home to have it edited. Time to purposefully stop living my Melbourne life and start living in the present moment, inspired by my surroundings so my ideas and words flow, consciously choosing to avoid distractions that lie in emails and social media feeds. My out of office is on for a reason, it’s time for me to walk the walk.
