Some people say you should never go back to old homes, jobs or locations.
On the waterways if you live aboard, the likelihood of retracing steps is high and this week one of us has also been north of the border on 4 wheels revisiting old haunts. So is it good or bad in our experience?
On the waterways there are many advantages. Familiarity with locations gives you a headstart – you already know where good moorings, facilities, walks, shops, pubs and cafes can be found. That’s the convenience of familiarity. Simultaneously travelling through at different seasons brings novelty to the familiar too. We are now in Spring in a place we last travelled through one winter- snow is replaced by bursting buds. We are also travelling in a different direction which also adds a new dimension.
For us too returning to the familiar can often bring a chance to meet up with people we know who either live in bricks and mortar in that area or in boats on permanent moorings there. For us this last week has brought both, and a chance for a great reunion with a great coalboating friend whose patch we are currently in.
People are such an important part of a place for most of us. For me returning north of the border underlined how many of my family and friends from those days are no longer physically with us which was part of my emotional return response
However, like re-reading a good book, or re-watching a great film, travelling a familiar route lets you repeat a good experience and see things you didn’t spot the first time around.
Some places are well worth seeing more than once, and of course places change over time making them feel fresh and new even if you’ve seen them a dozen times.
Travelling lets you move through a landscape in multiple dimensions and time adds one more. Time allows us to see changes in a way many local to an area do not see them.
We change too, our experiences mean our perspectives alter and we see things differently when we returned. As a child some of the places I visited in Scotland this week I saw obviously through the eyes of a child. This week I appreciated them as an adult. Gardens were a highlight now that I truly don’t remember from the past for example.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” said Marcel Proust
They say you need to be aware that returning can lead to disappointment – places may appear smaller, scruffier, or as I found this week larger, more ostentatious and even bigger than I recalled. Perhaps that is still idealisation versus reality.
Returning can be a heady mix – of nostalgia, memory, familiarity or disorientated. New roads confused me this week – at least new routes are not something that regularly or suddenly crop up on the waterways!
Pickingupducks 