At the risk of being repetitive,

I posted this link and the pertinent passage on my facebook page, but figured it's worth having it recorded here as well. (So, Mark, you can stop reading, since you directed me to it.) Particularly as it says what I've been finding, just wasn't totally realizing it. And, as I said in the post, I don't think I'd have been able to put my finger on precisely all that it says, and articulate it all, for a good 20 years. Maybe this is also what factors into my boredom and my never-ending search for where I belong. It started off so strong in the first country I've visited, though again I know I like Europe too, it's just a matter of how to get there. So being dissatisfied with where I am when it's not where I want to be or THINK it's where I want to be, doesn't help.

The Curse of the Traveler, from the One Mile at a Time blog (http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2014/09/27/curse-traveler/)

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that’s perfect (we all know there’s no Shangri-La), but just for a place that’s “just right for you.” But the curse is that the odds of finding “just right” get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can’t travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you’ve seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It’s just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that’s like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.