Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It wasn't that I didn't want to have children or a life partner. Lina and I had been together
for a number of years, but we had just moved in with one another only months before this
journey. And marriage sounded so . . . permanent.
Did settling down mean that I would be also, well, just, settling? Not for Lina—she was
the love of my life—but rather for that cookie-cutter existence I had been trying to deny
ever since my first dreams of escaping “real” life had emerged. I couldn't help but wonder
if making the ultimate commitment might turn into that oak-filled London office? Would I
find myself staring out the window of my relationship, wondering if I had exchanged my
dreams just because I was following the path that everyone else expected me to? Even de-
manded.
“You can still do both,” Lina had told me during one of our last conversations before
I left LA, and as I sat on the other end of that line in the front office of an orphanage, I
wondered again whether I could honestly keep this adventure going and still have my emer-
gency contact back at home. Was that being true to myself or was that just being selfish?
“I'll figure something out,” I replied confidently, but I knew Lina could hear the fear in
my voice. What the hell was I going to figure out?
Since Calcutta was a port city, I thought of trying to bypass Burma by boat. I took out
my laptop and fired off an email to my shipping company contacts. And then I went out
for a long walk around Calcutta. I felt trapped. It felt like the frenzied streets were closing
in on me. It reminded me of when I was a kid at school, the classroom too small, the other
kids too loud, my heart beating too fast, and my legs just wanting to run home as fast as I
could. But then home was no more comforting. I arrived there only wanting to run back to
school—never happy except for that time in between.
I stopped walking. And it felt like the whole of Calcutta stopped with me. Mother Teresa
once said, “Love begins by taking care of the closest ones—the ones at home.” For so long,
I had run from home thinking that my job in life was to be done somewhere else. That in the
“somewhere else” I would be happy. Home was the unhappy place, and the open road was
the happy one. But if I looked back at the last few months, my greatest joys hadn't come
from asking people for help, or from that great unending road. No, they had come when I
was connecting with others. When I found communion. When I discovered a place within
me that was safe and gentle and filled with hope—that soft, quiet space called “home.”
And suddenly, it was as if all the gifts materialized before me. I realized they weren't
just about helping people to fulfill their dreams. In most of the cases, they were about help-
ing people reconnect to their homes. Whether it was giving a home to Tony in Pittsburgh,
