Where You Are Right Now Means Nothing To Anyone

Especially when you're a displaced bug on the windshield.

One of my weirdest quirks is feeling sorry for insects. Not just any insects, but the ones that land on your windshield at a red light. The bug casually sits there, hanging out hoping you don’t turn on the wipers. Then you resume driving and he gets stuck to the glass by the sheer force of headwinds.

The bug can’t get unstuck until you slow down or stop again, MILES away from where he started. It’s like you’ve abducted him from his family and home. Will he ever find his way back? Will his children starve to death because he was out picking up dinner and now he’ll never return home?

But we, as humans, couldn’t care less where he ends up because we assume bugs are just citizens of the world, right?

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Have you ever considered that nobody cares where you end up? Or that where you physically are as a dot on the globe means absolutely nothing to billions of people?

As a lover of travel, I have mostly chosen to blaze the trails alone. Each time I embark on a solo adventure my soul explodes with anticipation of the unknown and a healthy dose of adrenaline.

There have been many times when I’m exactly nowhere out there. The feeling that not a soul knows where I am is intoxicating, even if unquestionably reckless.

‘Exactly nowhere’ could mean everything to me, yet it means nothing to the billions of other inhabitants of this planet.

You could embark on the most life-changing adventure EVER and it means nothing to anyone but you.

When I lived in the Caribbean I would purposely drive twenty minutes from my home in Jamaica’s countryside, all the way to the beach each evening. My sole purpose was to capture a time-lapse sunset. Every single day.

There was no feeling in the world like witnessing the sun drown inside a fishbowl from a deserted stretch of south coast beach. Many local residents observed me sipping on rum in the same spot day after day, while doing absolutely nothing, all alone.

Me having a conversation with Tinkerbell - South Coast, Jamaica

Once in a while, I was able to coax my Jamaican landlord to join me but I don’t think he ever fully understood the draw. He probably just came for the rum.

To me, spending two hours in that spot each day was well worth the sixty seconds of time-lapse video I could save forever and watch on repeat. Occasionally I’d share them on Instagram but they were mostly for myself.

On the flip side of life-changing, you could also be in a life-threatening situation somewhere remote, yet it would still mean nothing to anyone but you.

I’ve been lost in areas where it is utterly stupid for a Canadian white woman to venture alone without the protection of tinted windows. And yes, I was fully aware that if something had gone wrong, no one would’ve had a clue where to start searching.

I would have simply vanished. Unsolved. Cold case. Dateline.

There wouldn’t have even been a First 48.

Picture yourself on Google Earth in a section of land where nothing but dense trees exist for miles. You’re driving along a narrow country road in a foreign land, nowhere near civilization.

No other vehicles, no shops, no nothing.

Cockpit Country in Jamaica — Image courtesy of SpringerLink

Now picture another vehicle barreling up behind you out of nowhere, pulling out to pass, and stopping right in front of you. You’ve got no options — you have to stop because he’s blocking the road.

The doors of said vehicle open and two strange men get out and begin walking toward your car.

You’re acutely aware this could go very wrong, very quickly, so you shove your purse underneath the seat and your two cell phones down your shirt. People have been robbed and killed for less on that island.

As it turned out, the two Jamaican men in the car were related to the woman I was on my way to see. I had no idea who they were but they knew who I was because they could see through my untinted windows. No white lady had any business on that road. My person had told them they could find me out there.

The men had only stopped me so that one of the guys could hitch a ride the rest of the way. People hitch rides with strangers all the time in Jamaica. Totally normal…until it’s happening to you.

It’s a bit sobering to realize that nobody from the outside world knew where I was that day. Why would they? Foreigners in Jamaica are supposed to be lying on a beach somewhere, sipping rum punch, right?

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It fascinates me that no matter how important we think we are in our own world, each of us holds very little significance in the bigger picture. Sort of like the bug stuck to the windshield.

This lack of significance is precisely why Instagram makes me laugh. Especially travel profiles that show what’s her name with a thong bikini up her butt crack, exposing her sand-covered ass.

What does that even mean and why does she have a trillion followers?

Author, Ryan Frawley, answered that question as simply as possible:

“I think we know why Little Miss Sandybum has enough followers to colonize Mars. But sometimes I wonder if I’m all that different. She shows off her butt, and I show off my words. It’s just my bad luck that people like butts more than they like words.”

The difference between our words and her butt is that words are art. Butts are not…unless Picasso painted it.

I suppose that’s why I never became a world-famous anything from my travel writing escapades. My Instagram featured no butts…just incredible scenery, culture, food, and adventures. You only get semi-famous for that kind of content.

Whether my journeys were momentous to anyone from the outside world or not, made no difference to me. I was out there doing it to show that it CAN be done differently than just beach-bumming and umbrella cocktails.

If I meet my demise during any one of my adventures in the future, they certainly won’t find me face down in a pile of sand.

I’ll be going out in the middle of something that meant the world to me alone.

How about you? What does your version of wildhood while travelling look like?

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