Sometimes I wish my body was as enthusiastic as my heart and mind can be. That was definitely the case on my return to Ireland a few weeks ago.
I had been looking forward to getting back for months. From the moment I knew I would get my European summer, Ireland was locked in as the place I would eventually land after everything else. I had planned for something like a personal and professional reset over a two-and-a-half month period: slow mornings, familiar trails, enough quiet to get serious about my work again, and long nights that stretch through deep conversations with close friends. I knew, after two months of bouncing around the US and Portugal, I would love not having to navigate so much of the usual transient guesswork; finding the best grocery store, learning a new neighborhood, or finding my evening route. (I love a post-dinner walk in a new place with a new book in a new park.) I knew the roads in Ireland. I knew the people. I knew how the days were going to feel here once I unpacked, re-stocked the cupboards, and allowed myself to finally settle into them.
Within a few days, I felt terrible with enough symptoms to invite theories from friends and family although none of them were particularly convincing. “Maybe something was going around.” “Maybe it was hayfever.” “Maybe it was exhaustion finally catching up with me.” “Maybe I had just done too much for too long and my body’s tally maxed out.” With a sore throat making it hard to speak and swallow, cold sores covering my lips, and stye partially obscuring my vision, I heard everyone out but never cared where we landed or what we called it. I didn’t need the particular satisfaction that comes with any kind of diagnosis. (I was just glad these were people who knew me before I looked like Quasimodo.) I just wanted to wake up and feel normal again.
But that didn’t happen for the better part of two weeks. Mostly, I stayed in and slept at an Olympic level. One weekend I found myself collapsing into bed at nine o’clock on a Saturday evening, only to rise at seven Monday morning. The entire Sunday only a few blinks in my memory. It was frustrating in the way illness always is but a pining disappointment pushed it to a deeper level. I had such a clear picture for what this time would be for me and now it was accounting to just about nothing.
There were people I wanted to see. Places I wanted to revisit. I dreamed of long walks and productive mornings and that particular intimacy of an Irish evening where time gets warped because nobody can bring themselves to stop the conversation. The distance of the last nine months had helped me to romanticize all of it again.
Instead, I was mostly alone and, in retrospect, that was probably for the best. I should say, I have a tendency to interpret everything (and especially the enforced stillness that comes with illness) as some sort of cosmic intervention. I don’t mean that every dose of the flu or head cold is a message from the Universe but I can’t say I don’t mean that either. (Ha!) I know well enough that sometimes the body is simply tired and that sometimes you get sick because the world can be a disgusting place. But, I also know myself well enough to see what would have happened if I felt perfectly healthy these past few weeks: I would have ran myself ragged. I would have filled the days to completion. Immediately. I would have gone and done everything I was invited to. I would have added more and more to the calendar, worked my ass off, and kept moving with the mantra “this is what settling in is.”
Illness eliminated that possibility and grounded me before I had the chance to avoid becoming truly grounded. And, once I had nothing to do but be, I really didn’t want to be here anymore.
I hated the truth in that so much that it brought me to tears. Literally, hunched over and sobbing on the sofa. It bothered me so much more than being sick.
Months were spent fantasizing about this time back. Ireland has always occupied such an important place in my imagination and in my day-to-day life that admitting I felt regret in the decision to come back almost felt like an act of treason. I resist using the word regret, generally, anyway. I hate the feeling of somewhere or something or some choice feeling like a mistake, especially when it comes to travel. I have lucked out though and almost always find something in somewhere, eventually. Feeling the hum of a new place counts. Trying a new type of local food counts. Even coming to the conclusion that a place isn’t for me counts. My belief is that nothing is ever wasted if your eyes are open and you’re paying attention.
But then again, there I was, wasting away in Ireland and ruminating on why I had committed so much time to being somewhere I suddenly wanted to leave. There was no excuse. Trust me, I looked everywhere for an inciting reason. It wasn’t Ireland’s fault. But that only made the feeling harder to explain. Nothing had really happened. No one had done anything to me. My town, county, and country were really no different than how I had left it. The same trails. The same cliffs. The same current, flow, and waves of connection and solitude.
What made it all so strange was how much Ireland has given me. Over these last three years, I’ve encountered a version of my life I never could have even imagined nevermind have gone in search of. It was the depth of connection that surprised me. I found family here in new ways and established friendships that quickly became consequential. I walked more. I lingered more. I breathed more. I learned the value of spending an afternoon doing nothing.
Ireland arrived in my life at a time when expansion wasn’t simply desirable. It was necessary. I needed cold-hard evidence that my life was capable of stretching beyond the boundaries I had been self- and forcibly-contained in. I needed a new rhythm, new routines, new people, and other ways of spending the day. I needed to get reacquainted with curiosity, creativity, and contemplation. I needed to let myself feel the uneasy confidence in belonging somewhere I didn’t come from. I needed the world to get bigger here and my world did get bigger here.
For most of my life, Ireland has always represented that kind of growth and expansion. Maybe that is the stealth expectation I had set when deciding to come back. I don’t believe I booked the flight thinking I could recreate some earlier version of myself, although I am known to do that. I’ll attach an era of my life to geography and check back in as often as I can to see how far I’ve gone and how much I’ve grown since then. I return to restaurants where important moments happened, cities where I felt the most alive, and always make a point of walking past the apartments I used to live in—checking the windows for ghosts of Christmases past.
I can’t be the only one who expects a place to hold our life experiences in escrow. Sometimes it does (or seems to) and, other times, I come back to realize a place can change at an equal or greater rate than I did. The better I felt the easier it was for me to admit that. It became clearer the less I could blame the feeling on being sick; the more I could see people; the more I could do things; the more I could feel the restlessness didn’t entirely disappear.
Ireland hadn’t failed me in delivering an experience I remembered or needed. I had already had those experiences—when I needed them. Ireland has always done an extraordinary job of being what I need—when I need it. Expansive. Connective. Grounding. It has become the touchtree to the better part of a lifetime of becoming, but I think I confused my gratitude with an obligation to keep recreating it. That’s an immense and strange pressure to put on a place one loves.
If somewhere once made me happy, I expect it to continue to make me happy in all of the same and familiar ways. If I once found freedom somewhere, I hate to admit that my relationship might change with it later out of fear of diminishing it completely. But changing my relationship with a place doesn’t change what happened there. It confirms it.
At first I felt like I shouldn’t have come. Now I know, I needed to come back to know this. There was no way to see or feel or learn this lesson from Austin. There was no amount of meditation or contemplation this whole summer that could have given me the same answer. I, who planned two months in Ireland back then, remembered how important this place had been to him and wanted to return to it. The only way to have become aware of and accept that I had moved beyond some part of that relationship was to return.
So, during the first week here, I edited the itinerary: I chopped the plan to stay for two and a half months to just six weeks and began looking at flights. I wasn’t disappointed in Ireland and I certainly wasn’t angry with it, or even particularly sad about the change of plans either. I’d say I felt something closer to a wave of gratitude and a twinge of discomfort in recognizing that an old idea about myself was no longer true.I came back to Ireland expecting it to help recalibrate me and it did—just not in the ways I had been expecting.
Sometimes we return to old places expecting to find ourselves there, only to discover we’ve moved on before we even arrived. And somewhere in the middle of realizing that for myself this go-round, I shocked myself and said, “I want to go home.”