All My Solo Travel Stories Will Never Be Told: Feeling Sober

As a trend solo travel seems cool and liberating. An ingrained aspiration of every modern woman. However, in reality it’s a lot more. Deep and ongoing solo travelling is formative. It forms your very fundamentals. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but if it clicks for you, you become a certain way.

There was a common saying in Bollywood movies a few years back, “Ladki haath se nikal jayegi”. If you expose a girl to education, work or any other unusual activity in life, she will be out of your hands. She will change indelibly and won’t fit into the usual social molds anymore. This applies to everyone and not just women. Once you expose a human to a very different lifestyle they can’t come back and be ‘like everyone else’. Army folks will be a certain way even after they end their active duty. People with traumatic childhoods will be a certain way once they grow up even if they have left that trauma behind. Mountaineers, after scaling the highest peak would come down different. Because experiences shape us.

It’s only after my solo cycling and camping adventures in Europe and then Australia, Taiwan and a bit in India that I have realized the deep shift that has taken place inside.

Most people who want to talk about solo travel, their questions and thoughts hardly ever resonate with me. Only the people with a more rugged experience have been able to ask me questions that actually mattered to me.

For a large number of women and men in society their questions pretty much get stuck at,

“Why Solo Travel?”, “Is it safe?”, “Don’t you feel lonely?” and once in a while a funny one like “How do you click your photograph if you travel solo?” ;)

And I don’t particularly make it a point to find travellers more attuned to my style. So this means that most of my solo travel conversations with people are not particularly interesting. I don’t care much about questions like ‘Why solo travel’, because I love it. And it’s what I want to do. So I do it. The people keep questioning because it’s unusual for them. It’s NOT unusual for me. More importantly for the people asking questions they aren’t really invested in solo travelling. This is also why talking about it with them feels often superficial

Solo Travelling Without An Anchor Person

A while back I realised that I love my solitude and I don’t have a particular person with whom I share ALL my adventures. Some solo travellers may have a one person who they share everything with. It could be their mother or sibling or spouse or lover. They in some way become like an anchor and chronicler of most of the persons stories. But I don’t have that kind of person in my life. And so, with the years of adventures already behind me and assuming more to come, I doubt I will be able to share all my adventures, ever. It’s a sobering realisation. I had not had it earlier.

Especially with a blog like this to share my thoughts, I kept thinking of all my blogs that are pending, to adequately cover my adventures. But if a proper list had been maintained it would have been way too long by now. So I don’t think it is possible anymore to cover all my adventures in depth. I do have a small list I maintain but that just covers the quick blogs I want to write of recent adventures. And a few detailed ones I may pick and choose to write as I feel like.

It’s sobering to realise that I never really will be able to cover my adventures here the way I had earlier envisaged, in the initial days of travel.

I should mention however, that I don’t feel anchor-less from within. My guru and spiritual sadhana and also a feeling of universal love in my heart keeps me very well centered in life. And this focus and balance is always there. I am talking only about the actual articulation and sharing of stories with a person or ‘people’ via blogs and such.

We are all Untold Stories especially Solo Travellers

When I think deeply, most people in life, hardly ever get a chance to truly share their unique experience of life – not just external situations, but the inner experience of the person – it hardly happens. Very rarely I think if two individuals are very close and connect deeply then that might happen. But otherwise, social relations are at a superficial level so each person doesn’t realise that he/she is actually alone with his or her inner experience in this big world. The feeling of ‘being with someone’ acts like a panacea. And many people don’t even realise that they are alone. Either a startling revelation when someone near to them shows different colours, or a near death experience, brings home the fact that we all are significantly alone with our inner experience, always.

As an immersive solo traveller, this reality is poignantly loud. It’s not just about not having shared my experiences in entirety at all. But even a large number of external situations, just the bare facts, I haven’t gotten around to sharing. Writing a blog takes too long. I hardly hang out with other solo travellers like me. And with the other people I spend time with, usually the discussion doesn’t get into the depth of matters, because they cannot relate. Once in a while when I do meet other people with a similarly deep experience, there are different levels of resonance and feeling of camaraderie but it is a small meeting.

But it does happen that I meet someone for just half a day and the kind of conversation I have is very, very relatable. That’s fun. Maybe I should hang out more with such people.

And I think partly this feeling I have is because I am a girl, and girls are even less likely to have my kind of adventures (which includes some non-travel stuff too like entrepreneurship). So if at all I find someone with whom I can talk stuff that really matters to me, they are men. Which is OK but it would be good to have few more girls with whom I can chat too. I am sure they are there but I haven’t made any major effort to connect with them. I do like my solitude of life. And more than solitude, I think we all remain caught up in day to day rigors of life.

So, I doubt I will be able to share ALL my life experiences with anyone, ever.

And it reminds me of Sadhguru, who often says that a Guru is always looking for a shishya with whom he can share all his experience, but it hardly ever happens.

Most of the Masters go without ever being able to transmit what they really want to transmit. I would say even in my life, what I can do in terms of imparting and what I am doing is just 2% of what I am. If I can increase it by one percentage point before I fall dead that is a great achievement.

I never particularly thought much about what he was saying. Because I didn’t have so many stories and unique experiences to tell then. But now as I realise that most likely I will not be able to share all my experiences of this life (which is just 30 and some years) even in words forget any kind of deeper ‘transmission’ :D So, I thought back to these words of Sadhguru. I see these words of his in a new light.

I don’t feel sad or lonely or any such. I actually think its pretty cool and I am very happy with my life choices. I would have liked to conform and remain relatable with every one around me, but that involves a lot of meaningless stuff. So I am happy to be out of it.

I feel a bit sober about this.

Until the next adventure. ;)