The Burden of the Return Ticket

Think about when you travel: no matter for how long you are gone, the last 10 to 20% of the journey you just want to get back home.

You drag your feet from 'must see' to 'must see' at whichever place you are, regardless of how amazing the place itself might be. You laze at the hotel most of the day and probably have breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same café. The weather becomes awful, the locals annoying and that pain in your back just unbearable. The saddest part is that if you had started your journey there it could very might as well have been your favorite spot.

If you are a long term traveler, an elephant walking down the street playing the tambourine wouldn't distract you off your drink for more than two seconds; if it's after a work holiday you feel that you shouldn't have taken so many days off.

I call it the burden of the return ticket, a form of disease that disguises itself as necessary and affects us way beyond our tourist experiences. If you take away the adornments and peculiarities of traveling, all that remains is an event in the future that prevents you from enjoying the present. But to make matters even worse, most of the times there's absolutely no logical explanation for this to happen.

Think about goals, objectives in life. A motivation in the future necessary to keep you willingly moving in the present. Everything you do becomes a means to an end; even though you might not like it, you still 'have to'. The more you seek that goal, the more anything not contributing to its accomplishment becomes a waste of time. The further away you feel from the goal, the hardest your everyday becomes. Effort becomes a given, sacrifice a regular subject.

You might eventually succeed, but it becomes irrelevant. By then you'll probably have a new goal, a better or more important one, something you neglected to see before. And what if you don't succeed? What if you change your mind or find yourself at a dead end? Does everything you did become then a failure?

Objectives are the return ticket of life: an event in the future preventing us from enjoying the present, a dreamlike to be situation that helps us cope with the actual nightmare. But isn't the perspective of a dreamlike situation what by opposition turns the present into a nightmare? If not entirely, it definitively has a lot to do with it.

Life has no goal, because you might die before reaching it or reach it and find out you are still here. The future doesn't exist until it becomes present, so a perfect future can never be the result of a dreadful present. Like the dog chasing its own tail the human that chases objectives behaves: it always seems to be one step ahead, and when trapped it's just released and everything starts over again.

You don't necessarily have to avoid buying a return ticket to enjoy your journey till the last minute, but you act like if you hadn't. You don't need to buy one with an open return, but you think as if it was. The date for going back might be set, it's just that you don't worry so much about it.

We are not better or worse at living because we accomplish our objectives or not, but we do are better at living once we realize that it's all one big game this goal setting stuff. You don't necessarily have to change what you are doing to be happy, but only change how you do it. Relax, play, enjoy, let go when the time comes, live your life like if there was no return ticket. The future image of yourself is not capable of giving you happiness, whereas the present one is. Work for the latter, and remember that in the end it's all a matter of perspective.