Travel rhythms

Did you ever pause to think about time as something entirely non-linear, something foldable and fluid that shape-shifts depending on the reality we happen to be inhabiting? I have developed a quiet obsession with time and the impossible task of truly understanding it, not just in my logical mind, but as a physical sensation in my bones, often wondering if the realms of parallel universes and quantum physics hold secrets about time that make a mockery of our ticking clocks.

What I know for certain is that my own perception of time has profoundly fractured and changed, a shift I first noticed during a spring we took a three-month-long trip to Mauritius. That was the first time we truly stripped away our safety nets and slowed down to the heavy, unfamiliar pace of absolute stillness.

Stripped of chores, pressing deadlines, and well-worn rhythms, we had only ourselves and what felt like all the time in the world, but paradoxically, that time became a long stretch of nothingness so deeply uncomfortable that it forced us to question everything about our existence up to that point. In the heart of that discomfort, life suddenly transformed into a tangible, deeply textured feeling where we tasted every possibility of what our days could, should, and ought to be. We stopped moving and simply observed; we felt deeply, we asked unanswerable questions, and we realized the most precious gift we had been handed was simply the time to be.

Time there felt endless, stretched far beyond its natural edges until it threatened to snap, only to suddenly speed up and compress into a fragment of a second, leaving me experiencing a wholly new dimension and wondering if this was the wisdom of growing older or just the humbling realization of how little we actually comprehend. Since then, my perception of time has been constantly accelerating; I want desperately to hold onto the illusion that I am as young as I was yesterday, but watching my children rapidly grow and evolve violently confronts me with the undeniable, unstoppable passage of days.

Then there is the strange elasticity of time in this traveling world, where the phenomenon of "slow travel" exists on a deeply personal spectrum—for some it means staying five days, for others a month, but for us, true slowness requires a much longer surrender. Traveling and moving with the Traveling Village for the second time in two years feels incredibly fast to my nervous system, operating on a rhythm of five weeks in one place followed by ten days of transition.

A couple of days ago, I realized with a sudden exhale of relief that I had finally found a rhythm of being right here in Hualien, and that I deeply loved it. It took me exactly three and a half weeks to carve out that well-known, everyday rhythm of living amidst the chaos—balancing sleep, the sudden jarring shake of earthquakes, workouts, grocery runs, the endless needs of my kids, community gatherings, precious alone time, laundry, and my anchoring yoga practice. There is an exhausting amount of life to figure out every single time we pack up our bags, and now, with only two weeks left here, I am staring down the barrel of another transition: a new country, a new space to learn, new ways to share and explore.

I despise transitions; they force time to speed up recklessly, leaving me breathless, unmoored, and stressed. I crave slowness even when that vacuum of empty time makes my head spin, because what I truly love is the art of figuring out the everyday, ordinary ways of simply existing in a new space. I don't need much, and it is that very little that I cherish the most.

We are constantly living out a brutal dichotomy: the act of traveling inherently speeds everything up, yet the only thing our souls are truly begging for is slowness. I am held captive in this tension, unable to envision any other way to live, so when people ask if we plan to stop traveling one day and finally plant roots at a single base, my outward answer is "I don't know," but deep in my marrow, I know that right now, I absolutely do not want to stop. I want the slow, deliberate pace of a quiet life, but I reject the stagnation of complete stillness.

As Albert Einstein once noted about the very nature of the universe, "The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion," a thought that perfectly mirrors my own questions about this journey.

So the ultimate question remains: how do I forge a sustainable balance of being, moving through the world while somehow coaxing time to walk gently beside me, rather than constantly racing against me?