the quiet beauty of anonymity

Tomorrow, I take my leave of the Marianna and fly to Berlin. I will spend about five days there visiting a friend before hopping over to London for the remaining of my time in Europe. Tomorrow, I strap on my pack and head back out into the world. I feel as though I am emerging from a cave. A great cave, to be sure, with plenty of light (and crazy amounts of wind), but a symbolic cave nonetheless.

My life as of late has been reduced to a few simplicities: sleeping, eating, working, reading, cooking, baking, swimming, jogging and writing. It’s been exactly what I needed after four straight months of bouncing around like a maniac. I love traveling, let me make that clear, but even the most transient of vagabonds needs to be a hermit every once in a while. This has been my hermit time, and it has been lovely.

Over the past three weeks, I have barely spoken to anyone besides my father. Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I’m a talker, and yet lately, I have been nearly mute to the world around me. Many people I meet, at the store or around the marina, assume that because I’m American, I don’t speak any French. Usually, I would set them straight and respond in fluent French, but, I haven’t been correcting them. Rather, I have embraced my place as an outsider, a quiet observer in a “foreign” land. I have not offered much besides the niceties of “bonjour” and “bonsoir” to the people I pass, and I have been gifted an alluring blanket of simple silence – simple being the key word here. There are plenty of voices and noises around me all the time, but rarely are they directed at me. I am left to my own devices, to answer to almost no one - and that is sweeter than you can imagine.

I hadn’t really realized that I could enjoy this level of communication disconnect before. I have always been one to make a big effort to associate with the people around me, especially when traveling. I have been greatly rewarded with eye-opening conversations, incredible connections, and beautiful relationships with strangers who have turned into family. I encourage all who travel to make this effort; you won’t be disappointed. But just as engaging with the world and people around you is a rewarding and important part of traveling, so is sitting and digesting all that you have consumed while traveling. Connecting can become tiresome after a while; it demands a lot of energy from a person. You’re constantly putting yourself out there, trying to learn as much as you can, experience everything to the maximum, and frankly, it’s exhausting.

This existence of quiet anonymity has given me the time and space to communicate in another way, through my writing, and for that I am full of thanks. My only hope is that I can carry with me this peace and quiet into all aspects of my life, especially when I am back at home creating my routine. It is not something that just happens naturally, especially in a big city like Miami; these are things that I have to etch into my daily life, and not just find the time but make the time to do these things that bring me joy – writing, baking, cooking, swimming, running, and the like. It’s hard when you’re trying to pay bills, have a social life, spend time with family, and all that jazz- but it is possible.
Some things must fall away, of course, but this is the essence of prioritizing, and action expresses priority. I hope I can organize my priorities in such a way that I carry the simplicity of the lifestyle I have been living aboard the Marianna into the complicated and crazy life I will inevitably be thrown back into when I return to Miami at the end of the month. I set this now as my goal for the future, and I intend to stick by it.