Is This the Wrong Time to Love Travel?

I was 22 years old, sitting on my sister’s bed in our family home in Melbourne. She wasn’t there. I don’t remember why I was in her room. But I remember my parents being nearby, and I remember saying it out loud, maybe for the first time: I don’t think I’m built for a life in one place.

Nobody argued with me. I’m not sure anyone knew what to do with it. I’m not sure I did either.

That was over thirty years ago. I have since lived on multiple continents, walked a hundred miles alone through the English countryside, and raised two children out of a carry-on. I have also, recently, been made to feel that this is the wrong time for any of that.

The argument goes something like this: the world is unstable. Gas prices, geopolitical tension, economic anxiety. Planes may not fly. Money may not stretch. And so anyone still talking about travel — still posting, still planning, still pointing at beautiful places and saying go there — is either deluded or irresponsible. Possibly both.

I’ve been sitting with that. I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.

Prices are real. Instability is real. Not everyone can get on a plane right now and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If the work I make stops accounting for the world people are actually living in, that’s a failure worth naming.

But there’s a second version of the argument that I can’t get behind. The one that says: when serious things are happening, the right response is to get small. Close down. Stop. Prepare for the worst and wait.

My body doesn’t react well to that.

That’s not a political statement. It’s something closer to a physical fact. I have tried getting small. I know what it costs. The version of me that stays inside the bubble — careful, contracted, waiting for permission to live fully — is not a safer version. She’s just a diminished one.

People went to the cinema during the Blitz. They danced during the AIDS crisis. They booked holidays in 2008 when the world was financial rubble. Not as denial. Not as ignorance. As a declaration that life was still happening and they intended to be in it.

Travel, for me, has never been about escape. It’s been about expansion. There is a difference. Escape is running from something. What I felt at 22, sitting on my sister’s bed, was the opposite — a pull toward something. A life wider than the one I’d been handed. Not because the one I had wasn’t good. It was. But I had this internal signal, quiet and persistent, that said: there is more. Not more as in better. More as in wider.

Following that signal is the best decision I have ever made.

So when someone tells me this is the wrong time, my first response is guilt. Not the useful kind. The reflexive kind — the kind that arrives before you’ve even decided if it’s warranted. I look at what I’ve built, the life I’ve made from that quiet signal I first heard at 22, and for a moment I see it the way the critic sees it. Indulgent. Ill-timed. A woman pointing at beautiful places while the world is on fire.

The guilt doesn’t last long before the outrage arrives. And the outrage isn’t pretty or principled — it’s personal. Because what’s actually being asked, underneath the geopolitics and the gas prices, is that I make myself smaller. That I take the thing that saved me — that opened me up, that made me a person I actually recognize — and I apologize for it. Quietly retire it until further notice.

I don’t know how to do that. I’m not sure I should. The version of me that gets small and waits — for stability, for permission, for the right time — I’ve met her before. She’s not more responsible. She’s just more afraid. And fear, dressed up as practicality, has a way of sounding very reasonable right up until the moment you realize it’s been making all your decisions.

I am not interested in a fear-shaped life.

The world is uncertain. It has always been uncertain. And there have always been people who used that uncertainty as a reason to get small, and people who used it as a reason to stay curious. I know which one I am. I knew it at 22, on a bed that wasn’t even mine, saying something out loud that I’d probably known for years.

I’m still saying it.