on the intimacy of travel

and the 5 good things of growth-promoting relationships

There is an unusual intimacy that emerges when travelling, especially with strangers. You’re sat next to one another on an overnight flight, legs and elbows perhaps touching because there’s nowhere else for your limbs to go. Your stranger seat mate’s exuberance spills over into your bubble: “I’m from Serbia. Where in Toronto do you live? What part of town? I live 5 minutes from the pond, if you just go south a little, then left. Yes!” Then on your connecting flight - a friendly man from Alabama who greets you with y’all is headed to the second phase of a stag party. You ask if he’s taking the tram into Edinburgh too and he says: “No, we’ve got a bus taking us to the castle we rented in St. Andrews”. Ah, yes. A casual stag indeed. He too is enthusiastic though, and tells you he’s “so happy for ‘y’all” that you’re headed to your friends’ wedding. “I can tell you’re really excited,” he nods at you, big smile.

scenes from the windows of a plane, a bus, a train

Then you meet your friends’ friends at the tram platform at 8:30AM - unsure what they look like. “I’m wearing a beige coat and a red-orange fanny pack, incase that helps you spot us.” You put your hand out for a shake and they reach for a hug instead. You feel awkward for a second, but become fast friends over the course of 7hrs of train travel together - even texting while in different carriages: “Look - a rainbow over the mountains to the left!” You reconnect at the larger train platform with your friends’ former flat mate, who you’d met many years prior. It feels like the happiest, warmest reunion. You forget you’d only met over the course of three days a decade ago. Later, the driver who picks you all up from the train station and drives you along the winding, glorious Bealach na Bà mountain pass chats us up and stops to let us take photos at the peak. He becomes a delightful fixture of the weekend - driving us from the hostel to the chapel and back, too.

And of course, there is seeing one of your best friends again on the eve of her wedding day, approximately 30hrs of travel later. As she comes around the corner while you wait in the lobby for your room key, reality twists and bends for a minute as you realize you’re in the same room again, finally, after 5 years of long distance texting and snail mail. The tears flow, the hugs are tremendous, and you don’t quite know where to go from there - how do you move on from these beautiful big moments, go to your separate hostel rooms, and slip into the routine of the weekend? You say “Ok, see you in a couple minutes!” Because for the first time in 5 years, you’re only a hop and a skip away.

more scenes from the windows of a bus, a car, a plane

Relationality is fluid and tied to time only insofar as every moment is different.

When I’m working with people living with dementia, whose sense of time can (sometimes*) ooze or ricochet back and forth across their lifetime, this is especially apparent. The construct of time becomes less linear, and being in-the-moment is more clearly all we’ve really got. But, being in the moment with folks who might be* less grounded in the “now” as we presume to know it, creates a unique and beautiful intimacy. I love this passage from Looking Into Your Voice by Cathie Borrie, a collection of poems taken from conversations between the author and her mother living with Alzheimer’s, and the way it depicts a nebulous sense of time & of the moment within the dementia experience:

page 1 of Looking Into Your Voice by Cathie Borrie

There is something parallel in the way travel establishes an intimacy in the “now”, while simultaneously warping time. The ten years between the last encounter and “now” collapses in the familiarity we feel between us. The stranger seat mate whose name we never even got, who we fell asleep next to and ate meals with, brings their lifetime to the “now” and is also gone from our lives the minute they step through the airport gates. The new friend who you’ve only known “now” becomes a close and cherished person despite the knowing that it could be years and years before you get to meet again. In sharing time with people living with dementia, we also don’t know the ways in which we are known once someone leaves the room, or when we meet someone again next, or even in the moment. And yet - intimacy and familiarity are often at the forefront of how we’re relating. So how might we understand these ambiguous, elusive, and somehow profound moments of relationship?

In Relational Cultural Theory (RCT), a theory that has deeply informed lots of my work, the concept of growth-promoting relationships is offered as an alternative to the binary of “good” or “bad” relationships. Growth-promoting relationships are defined as leaving both parties with 5 good things: zest, clarity, a sense of worth, empowerment, and a desire for more connection.

the 5 good things of growth-promoting relationships

There’s nothing in there about how long you’ve known someone or how long you will know them. Nothing about knowing each others’ names or detailed life stories. Nothing about length of time or frequency of seeing one another.

What’s more - I felt sparks of each good thing in each of the various passing relationships I encountered while traveling. So, would it be safe to say these were growth-promoting relationships even if they were but short glimmers? At least for me, they were. I suppose the ideal would be that they were mutually so, but I might never get to know how the other person felt/feels/will feel a week from now, two years from now, ten years… but the ripples of their impact will certainly stay with me, and perhaps, in some small (or big) ways, our encounter will ripple in their lives as well.

I would also add - that many of the five good things (empowerment, clarity, and zest in particular) tend to give me an extra jolt of creativity when I feel them in relationships. Blame it on the jet lag maybe, but despite the plentitude of inspiration I absorbed while traveling, and the start of my favourite poetry session ever (In Surreal Life) I’ve been struggling to write much of anything coherent as far as poetry goes. It is no coincidence that these zesty little moments of connection are THE thing filtering through the jet lag muck and making its way onto paper in exciting forms. Below, a snippet of a draft I wrote about one of our train buddies from the trip:

Githa gifts us the cup as we stand in the chill-wind of an Edinburgh eve,
A souvenir of new friendships tucked into Ara’s coat pocket.
We plot how to bundle it home, to grasp
the memory without crushing it with farewell hugs,
without cracking it in our suitcase. This isn’t a goodbye.
We text Githa a photo of it wrapped in dirty socks
but safe after a seven hour plane ride. We remark
how it holds the perfect amount of memory and water.

All this to say, that there is something magic and intimate in the small moments of connection we accumulate in our lifetimes. There is something creative and time-warping about both travel and growth-promoting relationships, and in particular, the relationships we encounter in travel.

May we honour all these special relational moments, the humans on the other side of them, and the zest, clarity, empowerment, sense of worth, and desire for more connection that arises in us because of them.

—

Can you tell me, in the comments, about someone you’ve met in your travels who has left their mark on you?

It doesn’t matter if you know or remember their name or not. Tell me what you DO know, how they made you feel, what their little ripples may be in your life? Have you ever written a poem, drawn a doodle, or taken a photograph with/of them?

Thank you, always, for giving me your time & brainspace today.

xx katia

* A note to say that “if you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve met one person with dementia”. That is to say, broad sweeping statements about the dementia experience are false, even if you come across some patterns now and then. It is important to me to make clear that I really do mean: sometimes, might be, maybe, possibly, here.

ps. I will also be posting relate/create snippets and quotes and images on a fresh Instagram page for it - give it a follow HERE if you’re on there!