Don't Jump; Jump

Balance is a tricky ol' thing. We've all got our tendencies, and most of us have multiple contradictory tendencies. For me, I'm as apt to pinch pennies for weeks on homemade lunches as I am to decide to spontaneously splurge on a coat/meal/trip, and I'm as apt to spend months researching a trip I might not even take as I am to make a kneejerk decision to zip off to Cuba for the weekend. (I have not made a kneejerk decision to zip off to Cuba for the weekend, but I am nearing a "you finished a chapter what's a fun cheap flight" milestone, so we'll see.)

There's a sweet spot in between there somewhere, and that's what I want to kick around in this post. How do you navigate that razor-thin balance point between "don't jump" and "jump"?
As I say, I'm an inveterate researcher. I was recently clearing out old files and was surprised to see how long ago I'd started reading up on Florence, Vienna, and a slew of other eventual destinations abroad. We're talking years before there was any concrete possibility of visiting, but apparently I'm a pretty enthusiastic daydreamer. And the way that I travel tends to follow this instinct: I'll have a deep pocket of more possibilities than I can live out by the time I arrive at my destination.

Sprawling past and present piles of research and possibilities in their nascent outline form. My Google Docs are a dense tapestry of Jackson Pollockian chaos.

The unhealthy version of this is when it turns into checklist tourism: a to-do list careening around a city without taking the time to just sit at a cafe and take in how people go about their daily lives (which is kind of an essential component of any satisfying trip I think). I've done that for sure. But the inverse is also true - arriving somewhere with nothing planned can lead to aimless wandering and lethargy, which also feels like a missed opportunity.

What I've had on my most delightful trips is the capacity to arrive with an array of possibilities that I'm willing to abandon in the moment when something more satisfying or exciting comes along. That ability to jump. I think about tossing plans in order to take a ferry somewhere unexpected for adventure and the unknown, or (maybe my favorite spontaneous travel decision) deciding one morning in Vienna to scrap my arrangements and grab a last-minute bus to Prague to surprise my dad at his choir's concert there, following the performance with some Czech takeaway pizza down the road. I think what I've realized after the past two years of fairly muscular travel is that these moments of impulsive jumping really only work when they're coming from a place of stability and preparedness - that for me (we'z all different folks) knowing where home base is makes it infinitely easier to dart out at random, that knowing the melody makes it easier to improvise freely.

Sometimes your ferry getaway leads you to peacocks that want to be your friend or maybe more accurately just want to walk around your things and get their smelly old feathers all over everything and specifically do not want to be your friend.

I've been finding a pace that really works for me, not just in travel, but in life. I've gradually been growing into my domestic aesthetic, having articulated the kind of feel and look that feels like home to me, and it's been a productive exercise to match my eagerness to get my whole place pulled together with a deliberate, researched, budgeted approach - which caution makes it all the easier to jump when the perfect piece of furniture turns up. (As a side note, it's kind of amazing how good it feels to jettison cheaply made furniture for the good stuff, taking time and finding things secondhand and on sale. Guess what this author likes, do you give up, it's wood, did anybody guess it.)

This author is also a very keen fan of Australian souvenir tea tins found at thrift stores in Chicago. He contains a certain number of multitudes.

And you know, beyond the stuff-ness of life, is the live-ness of life, and that's feeling much the same. The more anchored I am with healthy relationships and routines, stability of schedule and finances, the more freed I am to be impulsive and a little adventure-seeking in the ways that make me happy without losing equilibrium. It's very Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs, but uhhhh turns out that theory exists for Reasons and is, in fact, #good. Knowing where home base is makes it an awful lot less fraught to deal with uncertainty, curveballs, and chaos. If anything, it turns them from crisis points into moments of possibility.

So yes. As I fill my post-work, post-writing time with idle trip planning/doodling during my solo nights (balance in socialization is also extremely keen, turns out) I'm practicing this habit, both for some planned weekend getaways and for a longer finish-line trip. Oceans of research without getting married to a hit list, geographic possibilities that leave room for riffing and in-the-moment spontaneity, the capacity to let it drift if it's a balmy day and there's a path by the river that I didn't know was going to be there. It takes a minute for me to be ready to jump. But more and more, I jump. And the road is all the better for it.