Improving relationship with travel

Dear AAC-Team,
I am working on a topic that I´m feeling stuck with and need your help. It´s about my relationship with travel. A bit of background: I used to be super eager to travel and travelled a lot. At some point, I had to travel for business and this is when my love for travel turned into a source of stress. I did not enjoy it anymore but it became something annoying, depleting and disrupting to my personal life. A couple of years ago I moved to a lovely but rather remote area. I love to be here, be it friends, our home, the outdoor activities we can do, and the simple lifestyle. Going away doesn´t feel appealing to me. Further, I have very sensitive senses. Noise feels draining to me, as is the proximity to people. Being on a plane or train makes me suffer. I actually hate it because I feel like I have no space, all these people very close around me, the noise, the smells, the artificial environments. This made me avoid travel as far as possible. However, there are downsides, such as not being able to see my parents often enough, who are getting old. I´m becoming aware that their time and our time together is limited and either we share time now, or we won´t but they will be gone at some point. Currently I feel like I loose either way – if I travel to their place or don´t.
Therefore, I´d like to change my relationship to travel. Maisie pointed out that she could change her relationship to the wind. This is giving me hope that this is possible.
Could you please guide me how to turn the currently negative relationship into a neutral one or even a positive one?

 

Answer:

 

First of all, we totally get this. It makes sense that your relationship has changed, and we understand the sensitivities as well (you’re hearing from a fellow sensory-sensitive human right now!). I wonder if starting by defining the kind of relationship you’d like to have would be helpful. What would a neutral relationship with travel look like? Consider these questions:

• What would you like to think about it?

• What would you like to think about yourself as you travel?

• If you knew you had a purely neutral or transactional relationship with travelling, what would be different about how you approach and experience it?

• How would you care for yourself before, during, and after?

• What opportunities would you create by having this kind of relationship to travel?

You don’t have to answer all of these but they might help to guide you towards creating a vision. Get curious about what you like about the vision and what you might want to scrap or revise and why. Where is there room for imperfection? Once you have your vision mapped out, we can dive into the nuts and bolts of how to get there.