When is a little thinking time too much thinking time? When you think you’ve had enough time to think about it? Or when you know you’ve had enough time to think about it, analyse it, write a pros and cons list, and consider it as a possible phd topic? Funnily enough, this is something that, aptly, I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s one of the pleasures and the pains of travelling alone. On the plus side, you get to meet amazing, generous people willing to share a drink or a life story; on the down side those people can be few and far between, often leaving you with those who are all too willing to share the tales of their airline ‘pee-yuuwk’, complain about the heat (it’s Spain), and get you to read the map for them. That’s when the big guns, or at the very least, a big book, need to be pulled out in order to end all spurious, stultifying, or just plain stupid conversations.
I have done the long-term travelling alone thing before, and still recall those months upon months of having the same conversation -‘where have you been, where are you going, how long are you away for’ - with a bit of a shudder. I really didn’t want to do it again. This time, however, I’ve organised myself so that three weeks is all the time I have until I meet up with a friend. I know, I’m spoilt, but it’s still feeling a bit long.
I was very resistant to coming to Belgium in the first place, primarily because my Masters degree had been so incredibly isolating. I couldn’t imagine how topping two years of hardcore library time with a stint in a small village where I didn’t speak the language would improve my ability to make like a human, a skill I occasionally worry is getting rustier.
I’m not quite sure how, but over the last few years I seem, somehow, to have taken part in a pattern of ‘aloneness’. Not necessarily ‘loneliness’, although sometimes that follows; but somehow as I’ve got older, the things I enjoy doing (reading, writing, exercising, playing music) have all become things that one does alone [Stephanie Trigg has recently written on something similar here]. Furthermore, as I’m one of the few of my friends who doesn’t live with a partner nor have an all-consuming 9-5 (or 7-10) job, occasionally I’ve sensed that the line between time out and simply time passing is starting to blur.
I do wonder if this is just a part of my character type: a watcher rather than a doer, a thinker rather than a player, but I’m not entirely sure. I still remember on my year 12 school report, my English teacher wrote that I had ‘slyly never answered questions in class’ (yes, that was ‘slyly’, not ‘shyly’). I was gobsmacked, as I thought that I genuinely didn’t know the answers until I went away, thought about them, and wrote them down - very much a case of the old adage “how do I know what I think until I see what I say?”*.
I find that I need time away from things to understand them, shape them, and process them in a way that enables me and my world view to fit. Is this right though? Should I be down in the lobby of my hostel signing up for a bar crawl with all the eighteen year olds on gap years? I don’t think so, but I hope this doesn’t make me the human version of the cockroaches I just saw crawling all over the jambon in a window display: in prime position but still scuttling out of view.
At worst, at least I’ll have 400 million years to get it right.
* I should just point out here to those few people who read this blog who don’t know me – I am actually not as obnoxious as it, on occasion, makes me out to be. I swear.
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