How to say…

Wandering the world from new friend to new friend means meeting people you’d never imagined, forming bonds and relationships you’d never hoped for…and then having to leave them all behind.  Living anywhere means making connections — finding a coffeeshop where they recognize your order, going camping in the jungle with a group of Australian skydivers, cooking breakfast in a hostel kitchen and sharing the salt.  The more fulfilling and rewarding your traveling, the more likely you are to be building friendships, the kind that last for years.

But when the trip is over and it’s time to move on, you’re not only leaving a country or a city, but also a lifestyle: your lifestyle, replete with promises and patterns and relationships.  My favorite part of vagabonding is living somewhere — not just staying there, but settling in, building a community, knowing the secret back pathways and how to ride which bus to where I want to go.  So leaving a lot means saying goodbye a lot.

Peter S. Beagle said in his book “Folk of the Air” that his protagonist’s main downfall was that he wanted to be born, grow up, and die in each place he visited.  “You can only watch someone go away so many times,” he said.  Each time you leave a person, a place, a routine, it’s like leaving part of yourself behind; how many parts can you leave before you’re all gone?

How do you deal with saying goodbye?

(Notes: “Folk of the Air” is the best traveling book I know, and if you want some lovely music about saying goodbye, check out Justin Winokur‘s as-yet-unreleased album “Leaving.”)