Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Finding My Way



Travel is supposed to be about finding one’s self as about discovering a new destination. When I’m on the road, however, my primary goal is finding the bathroom in the middle of the night without bouncing off the hotel room walls.

I have a low travel IQ. Hard to confess when everyone thinks you are such an accomplished world traveler. It’s not quite as debilitating as fear of flying or insomnia, but it can be frustrating and demoralizing to feel so inept.

Those who share this under-reported condition with me also feel like idiots when they fail at such simple tasks as turning off the lights in their hotel room (so they don’t end up, as I have done, trying to fall asleep with all the lights blazing.) Or, also like me, they struggle to operate television remotes, high tech showers, ancient irons, spotty WiFi and unreliable hotel safes. Try to stay cool while prying open a safe when it jams shut only minutes before check-out and an early morning flight. I have to shower all over again.

If I so easily lose it inside a small hotel room, imagine how I unravel in a major airport or train station when I can’t find my way.

My first invitation to lecture in an international venue came from Shell Outpost in The Hague back in the late 90s. I didn’t want to make a first impression as some sort of diva, especially as they liked and used my books, so I turned down their kind offer to be met at Schipol airport in Amsterdam. Alone, I jumped on the train at the station right at the airport, in a self-congratulatory mood over my ability to find my own way.

And then I realized the train was going in the opposite direction of the Dutch capital. Compared to Canada, Holland is the size of a postage stamp so luckily, I was able to turn myself around without losing much time (or face).

I have been fortunate to travel more often lately with my own personal Global Positioning System—my husband. Eschewing GPS devices, he has my undying admiration for relying only on a local map.

Blindly following his lead, I have often had paralyzing moments (riding a trolley into the sticks of Budapest without any money or identification on me springs to mind immediately) wondering what I would do if for any reason we got separated. How would I find my way back to our hotel? I sound like a child, worrying a parent will let go of my hand. Some fearless global traveler!

But the truth is, I catastrophize constantly when traveling, alone and even with Rodney. I have cut back on imagining plane crash scenarios but I can still dream up other terrible, irrational calamities (usually involving fire) that I am convinced await us around the next curve. And of course, I worry about being stranded somewhere, utterly lost.

The good news is that a solution has finally become obvious to me: the way to raise my low travel IQ is to ask for help with whatever confounds, be it directions or operating instructions. In the past, I have tended to resist relying on others.

It could be my personality type, my personal history, or maybe I just prefer to act like men do when they are lost—which is to never ask for directions and keep circling around in life. But my own default has been to slap a smile on my face and report everything is just fine, no assistance needed, go-away-already!

Finding my way clearly involves finding a way to ask for help when I need it, which I fully intend to do in the future.

Unfortunately, there’s no one to ask about that bathroom in the middle of the night. Maybe having all the lights on isn’t such a bad thing after all.

1 comment:

  1. My husband seriously must have a GPS micro-chip inside his brain. Not only does he know the direction we're facing as soon as we emerge from any hotel, but he usually gets asked directions in the first hour to boot!

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