Age! - The midlife column: A mixtape against wanderlust

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Columnist Juno Vai

Photo: Roman Pawlowski / DER SPIEGEL

I am a hobbyless person.

When others talk about kung fu, bouldering or ultimate frisbee, I usually stay silent or mumble something about yoga and knitting.

In truth, I have only one passion that has run through my entire life but is hardly considered a leisure activity: traveling.

For as long as I can remember, I've been up and away.

As a teenager, the only way to broaden my horizons was through white lies, by tricking my parents.

If I wanted to go to Italy with a friend, I got the placet for a harmless Harz vacation - the trip over the Alps was then only a small detour.

No, I wasn't a "brava ragazza".

I quickly understood that nowhere else do I learn so quickly and effortlessly as in unfamiliar realms.

Languages ​​and dialects, grimaces and gestures, but also a lot about body awareness.

French poems in Cuba

In the late 1980s I flew to Cuba with an airline that had just crashed a plane.

"I can't recommend it," said the woman in the travel agency dryly, "one of my colleagues was in the machine, which is now dead".

I was young and stupid, but took the ticket anyway and spent unforgettable weeks on the island, which became a kind of initiation for me.

People bought food with ration cards, there were AIDS ghettos and compulsory tests, and contacts with western tourists were prohibited.

Still, our Cuban friends did not let their mood be spoiled.

We got drunk in a bar called "Casa de las Infusiones", recited French poetry on the beach, mixed cocktails and danced in the street.

I will never forget the 80-year-old woman in the old town of Havana, how she swayed nonchalantly in a trance with an impressive swing of her hips, completely to herself and cheered by the younger ones.

An unbelievable physicality, an inspiring agelessness that still exists today.

Cuba was timeless because people had time.

Sometimes we waited two hours for the guagua, the rickety public bus - and we didn't care.

Even the waves lapping on the beach under the milky moon seemed to flow in slow motion.

I experienced the same deceleration in Russia, where I lived with artists who never made plans and meandered through the days completely free of social obligations.

A healing experience that taught me a lot about myself and my origins in a dead-plan maddened land.

No matter which border I crossed, travel was always the epitome of inner and outer freedom, a play on a windy stage where I could be whoever I wanted.

Nobody knew my past, every encounter took place in the here and now, it had no history.

I was able to gloss over, talk about it, create a completely new identity for a reasonable period of time and then return to my comfortable old one.

As the daughter of a railway official, she prefers to take the train.

All too often, my everyday life was just a stopover on the way to the next adventure.

I suspected that my chronic wanderlust was more of a cheap escape mechanism.

Goethe called wanderlust an "inverted homesickness", "a longing for space instead of tightness".

In fact, I always found the village I grew up in frighteningly oppressive.

The small-minded and negative, the tendency to constantly observe and evaluate one's neighbor.

Perhaps this fear was what drove me to become a globetrotter.

The word fear goes back to the Latin angustia, which means tightness and distress.

The verb angere means to tie up, to choke.

Who wouldn't want to escape the iron grip of the everyday, prosaic, loveless?

A psychoanalyst would have little trouble explaining why I, the escapist, developed chronic shortness of breath just in time for growing up.

Because long before the diagnosis of asthma, COPD and pneumonia, I almost suffocated when I was born.

How do you translate wanderlust?

Which brings us to Corona.

The mask is annoying, I breathe shallowly, the tightness makes me oily.

When was the last time I spent six months straight at home?

I know people who traveled to France or Mallorca during the pandemic.

None of them was completely satisfied, even if the landscape was beautiful and the wine was good.

There is a shadow on everything, a kind of omnipresent standstill, a lack of authentic encounter and contact that makes breaking out stale.

Also because the holiday destination is so much like home in this respect.

That's why I have so far refrained from traveling - and almost miss it physically.

Wanderlust is a German word that is difficult to translate.

In English it has no proper counterpart, Italians and French misleadingly describe it as nostalgia and nostalgia.

In Russian one speaks of being drawn to distant areas rather than active longing.

In China you want a trip, but you save yourself the pain and labor.

During the first lockdown, I pinned a map of the world on my wall against the pain and marked all the places where I've been before.

There are quite a few, but there are huge regions that I have never seen before.

Travel and reading are alike in this - there are an infinite number of places and books waiting for us.

Looking forward to an English summer

I promised my son two trips - one to Japan, because he admires the culture, and one to the Sahara, where we will have tea together.

Travel has already changed radically due to the pandemic and a new environmental awareness.

The universal function of vagabonding, the gain of knowledge through observation, feeling, smelling, tasting and talking, remains.

"Fascism can be cured through reading, racism through travel," believed the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.

When the foreign becomes familiar, fear and prejudice vanish, it is a rush.

But travel should not be politically overloaded, because it also thrives on letting yourself drift away, on pleasant senselessness and uselessness.

And regardless of how loudmouthed Boris Johnson is about Brexit: I'm really looking forward to my next English summer.

At some point there will be a Covid-19 vaccine.

We travelers can pass the time until then with plans.

So: dreamed off, wafted away, forgotten about a dream trip.

I look forward to mixtapes that are travel memories, escape from reality - or a curious look into the future.

Thank you!

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