Back?

I just came back from almost 14 months on the road. An open ended trip around the world since December 2022. I’d packed up my life and flown to New Zealand. No plan. No agenda.

I meandered my way across Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Taiwan and many other places.

I left because I’d reached an impasse in life. There were routes forward but they all seemed so… predictable. Unsatisfying. I could get another job or go back to contracting. I could buy a house or flat. Then what? Go to work? Sit in a house?

I left because I’d done everything I could. Given everything I could. And that was before I took a 60% pay cut to become a civil servant. The heavily drunken words of senior civil servant echoing in my head, “you’re a fucking disaster.” I resigned a couple of months later.

Some executive at a two-bit consultancy tried to hire me and, after my repeated rejection, told me I was simply having a midlife crisis. “What will you do when your money runs out?” I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Ask me again in a decade.

Anyway, so I left.

I’d gone on extended trips before. This was different. There was no return planned and I didn’t have a place to come back to.

But I am “back” now.

Well, I’m in London again. “Back” doesn’t work. It’s not the same me that left and it’s not the same London.

That London. The shops, cafes, pubs and more. That’s gone. It belongs to memory now. This London I’m in now, it’s some other place.

I’m not the same either. My experiences have changed me. I have lived more in the last 14 months than many do in a lifetime. And I’d lived a few lifetimes already.

I see London as an outsider. Simultaneously familiar, echoes of previous lives, but also as just another city I’m visiting. Exploring, understanding people, culture, infrastructure… It feels smaller. But then I’ve walked these streets from a young age.

Why did I come here now?

Minor health issues, checkups. Wanting to see friends. Mostly I just wanted to see how I would feel.

It is good to see friends. Feels like I last saw them a week ago. They are fixed in this place. Time has passed differently for me.

Perhaps I feel detached because it’s barely a week since I landed and I’m still in “travel mode.” Perhaps it’s because this trip was longer than any I’ve taken before. Perhaps it’s because I’m in a tiny Airbnb room in Battersea and still living out of a backpack.

I don’t think it’s any of that. I had months in Melbourne of being settled and not in travel mode. This wasn’t a trip. I wasn’t on holiday. Wherever I was, that was where I lived.

“Trip” really doesn’t work. It’s just as invalid as “back.”

Reflecting on just before I left, I was surprised by the level of sadness and grief I felt when packing up the Pimlico flat I’d lived in for four years. Now I understand. It’s because I knew I wouldn’t be coming back.

And I never did. I’m not back.

This is a visit. I have closure now.

I’ve got some ideas for a way forward. I had to come here to be sure about them.

I’ll end with these words:

No man steps in the same river twice.

You can never go home again.

I belong to the world now.

I always did.