When I come across travel vlogs, something often stirs deep inside me. It is not sadness. It feels more as though some sleeping corner of my inner life has suddenly been woken—the sunlight spills generously onto the travelers' shoulders, and through that small screen, I can almost feel its heat strike me, too.
Some places take root in us the moment we first hear of them. We long to reach out and feel their textures for ourselves, as if keeping a long-awaited appointment, claiming, inch by inch, the scenes we have rehearsed in our minds so many times. I want to see a California sunset fall into the Pacific like an orange sweet, setting the horizon alight with a gentle flame. I want to see the penguins of Antarctica waddle awkwardly across the ice, through a vast, white silence. And I want to witness the northern lights in northern Europe tear open the night without warning, green ribbons drifting slowly overhead while stars flicker in the cold. One day, I too will stand in that light and feel the same wind against my skin.
I think the pursuit of happiness is one of our deepest instincts. I think of the place Andy describes from inside the prison in The Shawshank Redemption: Zihuatanejo, a small town on Mexico's Pacific coast, where he wants to buy an old boat, open a little hotel, and greet each quiet morning to the sound of waves that have “no memory.” However high the walls around us, however confined our days may feel, we can still long for a sea free of guilt and constraint. The body may be held in place for now, but as long as that thought remains, the soul has already crossed the walls and arrived at that expanse of blue.
That is why we are so deeply drawn to dreams we have yet to reach. On countless late nights, returning from the laboratory to my dorm room and setting down the day's exhaustion, I find myself packing for a journey, over and over in my mind. I may not have a ticket yet. I may not know when I can actually leave. But my heart has already boarded that flight, passed through the heavy clouds, and hurried towards the faraway place it has longed for. That impatient desire to make it all real, with my own hands, is itself proof that the spark of life has not gone out.
The world is still out there, and we are not ready to surrender.