In International Living, I’ve read about people who spend much of the year house-sitting. They rent a room or small apartment somewhere to store the stuff they can’t take with them, they often work online for their primary income, and they travel light. They move from Amsterdam to New York City to Granada with just a suitcase or two. If they’re well organized and good at taking care of plants or animals, they can move from house-sit to house-sit for months on end.
On the other end of the spectrum, some people can’t travel at all. They take care of a disabled spouse or parent full-time, or they own animals and can’t bear to let anyone else care for them, or they just can’t swing it financially. Fifteen years ago, I went with my mom to a meeting of Miami (Oklahoma) Travel Club. That day’s speaker had just returned from Bhutan and was showing a short documentary on it. At dinner afterwards, I asked the elderly woman next to me how long she’d been attending the Travel Club meetings. “Oh, for donkey’s years,” she said with a friendly smile. “At least thirty.” Impressed (though also horrified by the idea of eating jello and rubbery chicken once a month for thirty years), I asked, “And what was your own favorite trip?” “Oh, honey,” she said, with mixed pride and regret, “I’m a farm wife. Cows don’t milk themselves, you know.” I understood: she’d never traveled at all. Admiring her grit and lack of self-pity, I went on to ask her about her farm, her kids, and her grandkids. She’d clearly loved her life, hard as it had been. But I also thought, “Not a life for me. Not in a million years.”
Between these two extremes are the rest of us: people like me, who travel as much as they reasonably can, and people like my friend Esther, who travel as little as they reasonably can. People like Esther relish their friends, their familiar routines, their cozy houses, their dogs. They dislike the flurry of packing and unpacking; they find airports and long car rides irritating. If spouses or children push them into travel, they prefer to go to the same place (or the same kind of place) again and again. She’s like the writer Zadie Smith, who admitted to an adolescent obsession with novels over real-world experiences. Although she had learned since then to admire the risk-takers and even to do some traveling herself, she memorably confessed, “These days, given the choice between a week in the Caribbean and a week reading A High Wind in Jamaica, I would still choose the book and the sofa” (from her introduction to Best American Non-Required Reading, 2003).
Esther, for example, will allow herself to be driven to the Stratford Festival in Canada for six marathon days of theater every other summer. She will board a plane, shaking like a blancmange, when her son really wants her to. But without such incentives she’d be perfectly happy staying home. She grew up in a working-class Jewish household in Boston, raised by parents who had immigrated to the United States just after World War I. Describing herself as “a stubborn homebody,” she wrote, “I feel safest when I’m home—a reflection, I think, of the anxious and insecure environment I grew up in. My parents had hard traveling to get to the US, and they really didn’t want to budge once they did.”
After she graduated from Radcliffe in the late 1960’s, she got a great job writing for Harvard and worked at it for most of her career. Although she hated the commute, especially when she had to wait outdoors at the train station on winter morning, she enjoyed her colleagues and the intellectual challenge of her work. But the atmosphere there changed during her last couple of years. “I was unhappy in my job for the last two years,” she wrote me. “I was really ready to stop working, and from the minute I did, I’ve embraced retirement as a major gift in life. I LOVE waking up without deadlines to meet, interviews to set up, long hours of writing to fill. I LOVE reading, love napping, love doing shopping in daily dribs and drabs, making dinner with Ted, taking courses (right now, one on The Odyssey), keeping up with emails, etc.”
I love those things, too. Well, I don’t usually nap; I prefer a hot, soaky bath with an upbeat novel. But I do enjoy grocery shopping more now, when it can be a relaxed and cheerful expedition with only a few items on the list rather than the weekly take-no-prisoners march across the desert it used to be.
I love the way light floods into our house in the winter, with the sun low in the southern sky. I love lively dinners with friends at our table and slow evenings in front of the fire, with me reading in my chair and my husband in his. These pleasures of home and the familiar run deep. They’re the foundation of what sociologists call “life satisfaction.” They nourish us in profound ways.
But it’s the nature of human beings to get restless after we’ve been in one chair, or one place, too long. We want a change. We want to learn new things, to see new kinds of beauty, to taste new kinds of food. Esther’s husband is deeply interested in American history, so they take long car trips to the homes of presidents, novelists, and change-makers. As Esther wrote, “We’ve certainly done a fair amount of traveling, but except for our cross-country trips, have limited our trips to two weeks at most. I’m still that stubborn homebody. I seem to need the familiar—home, friends, habits—to make me feel comfortable and safe.”
It’s that last sentence that intrigues me. She loves the life she’s leading. So where does that faint note of apology come from?
I don’t know, exactly, but I do know that at times I share Esther’s defensiveness. For example: I don’t have much interest in tropical countries. The combination of heat + humidity makes me nauseated and faint. Even so, I feel vaguely ashamed of myself for it. Why? For people like me – people who are not fleeing horrors or unable to find work in their home country, people who are lucky enough to have the time and money to see some of the world – for us, travel is a luxury. Why should there be disapproval attached to one’s choices about where, when, and if to travel?
Because travel is hip, at least to places off the beaten path. Travel can be the badge of an adventurous spirit — and we Americans tend to admire adventurous spirits. It can become a status symbol, and few of us are completely immune to social status.
But these are flimsy and superficial considerations, in the end. We ought to travel if and when it suits us — when it suits our budgets, our personalities, our family situations, our sense of ourselves. And we ought to stay home when it suits us.
We want the world to feel safe enough to relax in but also fresh and interesting. Some of us get that freshness from seeing the beauties of a a different country and experiencing the customs, food, and art of a different culture. Others don’t. But traveler or homebody, we also find freshness in watching birds build their nests under the eaves, in taking a class on The Odyssey or gravity or the Civil War, and in making dinner on a spring evening with the windows thrown open. Those experiences are compelling and richly human. They’re important.
So hurrah for the homebodies and the travelbodies and everybody in between. Hurrah for all of us who find ways to keep our lives fresh, lively, and real.