You want travel to change you. Right? But then you come back home, and it’s back to your regular life, and the smells and sounds and memories and surprises drift away, and there you are, back the way you were.
This spring, I spent nearly two months on a pilgrimage, visiting 88 temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku. I know, I keep going on about it. It was, I hope, life-changing.
But how do you change a life? And why? I have good friends and interesting hobbies. I sing regularly. I live with a beloved man and dog. And yet I felt mild dread about going back home and having life be exactly like it was. What did I do this whole thing for, this two-month odyssey of tired feet and hard mattresses, if I was just going to end up back on the couch, scrolling on my phone?
Here’s a list I started halfway through the trip and added to as I went along, trying to capture some of what made the experience so rich and good – a mix of suggestions for home and descriptions of pilgrim life:
- Walk a lot until I get a job
- Walk in rain
- Carry things
- Stay off Instagram and Facebook
- Knowing what I’m doing – a plan/goals
- Being outside
- New experiences
- Learning
- See people in person
So how am I doing on this list, a month after my return?
I took one six-mile wander in the first week or two, but other than that it’s mostly dog walks and then the walking you do when you get around mostly by public transit. Which is a fair amount of walking, but it’s not going to add up to 150 miles a month. I do lean a little more toward choosing to walk even if it’s raining. Carrying? I haven’t been carrying any more than is necessary – certainly not the 15-20 pounds I sometimes had while hiking.
Facebook and Instagram are my preferred social media apps, and it was important to me to actually be on my pilgrimage, not immersing myself in the news and outrages from home. Or, just as bad, living for my audience and their reactions. I did eventually go back to Facebook to get advice from the group devoted to the pilgrimage, and re-installed Instagram to keep up with people I met along the way. After a break, it was easy to see that opening social media is like settling into a warm bath of my friends’ and acquaintances’ opinions and anxieties. I have plenty of my own opinions and anxieties!
That perspective was easy to hang onto when I was engaged with the trip. But here I am, back at home, letting the old obsession creep back in.
The pilgrimage had a goal, and it took my whole dang body and mind every day. It wasn’t easy; planning my hybrid of walking, bus, and train meant bopping back and forth between a paper map covered in post-it notes, a guide book, Google Maps, the amazing Henro Helper app, and a Japanese navigation app – that last one because I now know there are bus routes that Google Maps isn’t aware of. I needed all of these to figure out how far to go each day, where to eat, whether I needed to carry lunch, and where I could stay.
I was also exercising my brain by speaking Japanese every day and constantly learning new words and characters. And I was remembering how great it is to interact with people face to face. (I’ve been talking to more strangers in my neighborhood, and if you’re in the D.C. area with free time on weekdays and I haven’t already gotten in touch about coffee, I’m sorry about that.)
Here at home, what is my goal? What is my project? To teach my dog a new trick? To live well until death? Finding a job is a project, but it’s not as fun as working out how to visit all of temples 60-65, keeping in mind the weather, the huge climb to temple 60, the opening hours of the temple offices, the limited transportation options, and the availability of lodgings. Solution: 63, 60, 61, 64, 62; three days, two buses, one inn; and a smidge of hitchhiking. It was awesome.
There are ways that I’ve brought the pilgrimage home with me physically. Not just my stamp book, filled with red stamps and black calligraphy, or the heaps of souvenirs. My actual body changed. Partway through the trip I took in the waistbands of my two pairs of hiking pants with safety pins, and now I’m wearing jeans I had long ago given up on. Last week the eye doctor confirmed that my eyesight had drastically improved since my last visit, just four months before. Now I’m waiting on new lenses for my glasses, but I’ll hang onto the old ones – I assume the return to a life where I rarely look farther than the end of a leash will bring back my old eyesight again.
A few weeks ago I was setting out to walk to a doctor’s appointment. It was more than a mile from the nearest metro station, and I was feeling vaguely irritated about it. And I thought: Wait, you love walking. What made it so good in Japan? And I thought of the perfect tiny assemblages of plants that grow up on roadsides, like in the photo at the top of this post – violets along a rural road near the town of Susaki. And I thought: You can find that here.
Moments later, an abandoned gas station came through.
Did it fill me with as much joy as the plants I saw in Shikoku? Not really. But it was still a perfect little glimpse of the world that grows around us, and it made my day better.
Photos: Helen Fields, obviously
If you want to read more about my trip – like, a lot more – I wrote on Substack along the way. Click here to read all about it!
