The return journey

If the adventure doesn’t kill you, then when it ends, you may go home. Sam goes back to the shire, but Beowulf stays put. Some are done with adventures, others take to the road at once in search of new ones. Most of us, these days, go home. At least for a while.

If the adventure has been a good one, then recognising it is over and going home, can be a bit melancholy. But if your adventure was a happy departure from normal life, a convention, camp, re-enactment or the like, then it will be finite, and leaving is pretty much required.

It’s easy to see the journey home as what happens after the adventure is over. But of course it isn’t. The way home can turn out to be challenging (I think of hobbits again), or take a lot longer than expected, (Odysseus) or otherwise become a thing in its own right. Even when the adventure was a small one, more alcoholic than heroic, the journey home allows time to reflect and digest what happened. There’s a space to shift gears, putting the adventure into perspective, weaving it into the story of who you are and what you do. We can’t remember everything, and it tends to be the memories we dwell on that stay with us and most influence us. Deliberate reflection reinforces memory, is part of our inner story-making process.

Then, the return. Before we went adventuring, home may have felt like a small and unimportant place. An irritation. A trap. But now, coming back after the adventure, home is full of sweetly familiar things, reassuring, affirming and comforting. Think of Dorothy and how Oz changed her feelings towards Kansas. In going away, we can find perspectives on what we had all along. Exhausted and footsore from epic travels, hung over, battle bruised or however it’s taken us, home brings relief and a space in which to recover.

And plan for the next one. (In my case Asylum in Lincoln, 2 weeks hence).

I love to travel, to adventure, meeting new people, seeing new places. If I’m too long in the same place, I become restless and melancholy. I’ve come to realise a home is something I treasure most when it’s a place to come back to. The return journey is always one of discovery, the familiar seen with new eyes. Wandering is in my soul, but it’s good to have a place to belong as well.