Home = Vacation
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
A common conception regarding vacation is to travel somewhere. To change your everyday environment for something else. I used to think exactly that way for most of my adult life, until we moved to our house. Now, I want to go on vacation to go home, which is the precise anti-thesis to my previous stance. There is no place on Earth I would rather want to be than home. How did that happen?
Between 2007 and 2014 I travelled a lot, preferably by motorcycle but also a lot of flying to exotic places and renting a vehicle on site to reach far beyond where the usual tourists end up. Two international travels per year was not uncommon. One explanation is my personality traits, and I am extremely high in openness to experience. That usually correlates well with the desire to travel. The other might be some kind of Freudian suppression that resulted in a big recoil later. My family travelled a lot with us as kids, often by car, so I am no stranger to road trips from a very young age. However, my parents are not too adventurous and prefer to play it safe. A bit too safe for my taste apparently. And when I was a student, I could simply not afford travelling. But when I landed my first job and discovered the possibilities a proper paycheck brings, it did not take long before I went all in on world travelling. I spent a ton of time discovering amazing places on Google Earth and entering them as waypoints in my GPS. The strategy was usually to have a shotgun blast of waypoints in a certain area, and then spend 1-2 weeks there with a lot of flexibility with regards to weather and other factors.
But after I met my wife, bought our dream house, and began the journey of raising a family the urge to travel has vaporized. I do not feel anything at all. Honestly, what would get me excited is now just a discomfort. Before, a work journey somewhere was a perfect opportunity to take an extra day or two for some tourist duties. And now, I just want to get back home ASAP, and preferably not go at all if I don’t have to. There are two explanations that comes to mind. The obvious one is that priorities shift when you grow up and become a dad. Travelling (or anything else for that matter) also gets quite old when you have done it more than pretty much anyone else. I feel like I am “done”. But I also think that it has something to do with me finding my proper place in the world. I don’t need to escape from anything. I like it here. Before, I was insecure, immature, and irresponsible. A vacation was the perfect excuse to “escape reality” instead of dealing with it. Chasing a mirage on the horizon. I believe that it is very important to find a place called home, that does not feel as if you are just stopping by temporarily, on your way somewhere else. I have never felt the same way about any of my previous addresses like I do with my current one. My dream scenario would be to die on this address. That is how much I love this place.
Sometimes I feel like a failure that it took me so long to figure out that all I wanted all along was a wife, a family, and a house in the north. I should have realized that one or two decades earlier, but better late than never. The upside is that I had a solid social standing and quite a lot of life experience when adopting my role as a father. And that is always a good thing. Had I settled earlier, the probability that I would mess things up would certainly have been higher. But I would also have the potential to experience one more decade with grandkids. That’s something that I will never see because I am simply too old. The one thing that would have changed the trajectory is that if I would have begun aiming at the proper target about ten years earlier. But I was way too immature to do that. However, I am extremely grateful that I ended up where I did, finally. I am a really lucky man, considering how things turned out. And even though I might have “lost” a decade, a proper lifestyle in the later part in life can rectify everything. Quality easily beats Quantity in this regard. That is my interpretation of “Jesus saves”. I dodged a bullet, and my main mission now is to make sure my sons get their **** sorted faster than their old man did.