Leave Nothing but Footprints

I recently came across an article on Thought Catalog, This is the Painful Part About Being a Wanderer. Anyone who knows me well or at all will say that I don’t like to stay in one place for very long, that I move around like I’m being chased. 

This post perfectly captured the ache I feel when I leave a place and the people I love and care about but my subsequent longing to see and experience everything I can while I can. Even when I’m my happiest, there’s a part of me that longs to go somewhere new and another that wants to return to where I’ve been, not because it’s familiar but because I’ve left a small piece of myself there.

Stretching yourself and your love across time and space or across oceans and continents is exhausting because no matter how much you want to stay with a person or in a place, you want to go fulfill another perhaps. And at the of the day, your duty is to yourself so you leave, a piece of yourself remaining until you come back. Maybe this is why we can never truly be content with ourselves, because we want our full selves to be with us 100% of the time but that’s impossible because we’ve left footprints, pieces of ourselves, everywhere we’ve been, only to be picked up again when we return.

Is that what I get for constantly leaving? A life in the pursuit of something bigger and better only to realize that it won’t happen as long as I leave pieces of myself behind and opening myself to caring about others? Honestly, I am completely willing to leave pieces of myself in places I may never go again if I have the opportunity to experience something new with the possibility of filling those empty spaces with another person or place.

What keeps me moving to new places is the promise of something new. Whether it's a new language, food, acquaintance, experience, etc. Even though sometimes I don't know if I'm happy to be leaving again so I can go see new things or sad because it's hard, I am driven by the attraction of filling what I see as emptiness in experience or lack of knowledge. I miss places I've been, people I've met, and the comforts of the known but being able to fulfill my desire to see more and become self-aware distracts that. 

At the end of it all, the perhaps that us wanderers, us nomads, seek may never occur or it may occur with a greater consequence than we expected. If constantly leaving one place teaches me anything, it’s to keep an open mind and an even more open heart. There’s something special about returning to a place I visited or lived. It can make the goodbyes extremely difficult but it makes the hellos even sweeter.