Photo by Parker Hilton on Unsplash
I came back to Brussels this week after a few days away on holiday.
Getting away did me more good than I had expected. Not only was the sun was healing for my soul, the break away from routines was surprisingly liberating.
In all honesty, I hadn’t quite realised how entrapped I had felt within my own life recently.
This was partly about my physical health. A few months ago, I had reached a point where walking even a short distance would trigger intense lower back pain problems. Suddenly, leaving the house became an incredibly difficult task. Unsurprisingly, my quality of life suffered quite substantially.
Travelling away in of itself was a sign that my body was healing. I was able to navigate movement without too much issue. Being in a warmer climate with access to the beach allowed me to start moving the body in my own terms. I deliberately travelled with little to no formalised agenda, specifically prioritising my body over any social pressure to see the sites.
I hadn’t quite appreciated was how much I had felt constrained in my daily life in Brussels. It was only upon returning that I really noticed. Whilst in Spain, I felt relax and free, in Brussels I felt guarded and cautious. I was suddenly a lot more wary about the way I looked, and the social codes that I was meant to be playing.
There’s certainly a cultural aspect. Brussels feels more rigid in its norms around body types and nationalities. There are far less people I come across who have a similar background to me. Belgian culture also can be more closed and wary of difference. On the occasions that I hang around Belgian people, I generally have the sense that I’m notably different from them.
The other part of Brussels is the international community, particularly around the EU. This has its own pleasure of plurality and diversity. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve fallen away with that group too – my higher social status from my job dissipating, there’s a good chunk of people who have that as a guiding value of whether you’re worth talking to. But even then, I always felt an internal tension of how dominant white culture is within these spaces. I felt I had to hide my Bengali culture just to be more legible. Such experiences gnaw away at you.
The temptation with such experiences is to say that I’m simply living in the wrong country. And perhaps there may be a truth to that. But I think that would also be a somewhat hasty and false solution. Any issues I have with where I live will only be replaced with other unforeseen ones. The grass is always greener, as they say.
Still, the trip has given me a new perspective on life. I think I’m better seeing myself as of a traveller with a base of operations, rather than someone laying deeper, permanent roots. What seems to be a good life template for others doesn’t really feel right to me.
I seem to feel freer in the space of movement, where it’s clearer for everyone that I am a passing foreigner. I feel like it makes everything clearer for everyone. Perhaps it will remove that awkwardness where people find it impossible to place me.
I currently also think that I’ll come across more kindred spirits wandering the land. There’s a greater ease in meeting people who have a similarity of experiences, rather than looking for people from similar backgrounds.
This has been quite a shift in the way I see the title of traveller. I previously disliked the idea of it as a label. Often, people travel because deep down they are escaping something or someone. Sometimes that is something as banal as work stress. Sometimes, it is something as deep as rejection or abuse.
This brings its own unhealthy cycle. People constantly moving because they want to run as far as they can from their life problems. That, to me, doesn’t feel like a way to live. At some point, you have to deal with the challenge that life has given you.
But perhaps there’s a way of being a traveller where you’re neither escaping something, nor are you heading anywhere in particular. Instead, you’re simply travelling to explore life.