Everyone, it appears to me, is looking for someone or for something, some experience to re-live, something to either re-do, or undo, some event in the past, a journey to shed some shame or re-light the limelight.
I see it in my travels, during brief interactions I’ll enjoy with strangers when they may allow themselves unplanned moments to be distracted and untethered from cell phones.
“Retracing my steps,” said a young man at a table in a coffee shop – neither of us in our home countries – when he had no option but to chat. His phone had “died” and he needed the power outlet behind my seat. “Visiting the places I went with my dad before he died.”
My empathy immediately rose: one so young already searching.
“We are going back to the UK to show my son where his grandfather was born,” said a woman a few seats from me on a largely empty plane.
I held back on suggesting the journey was really hers given the child was at least 4-years-old and it was surely not his suggestion that brought them to this brief encounter.
I see and feel it in myself.
Have you noticed this within you, too?
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