Looking Happy While Travelling – 
So last month I was in isolation, but this month I’ve been travelling. In fact, I’m still travelling. The delightful point about travelling is that things are forever changing. Your routine dives headlong into a chaotic tangle of “must do”, “always do” and “doesn’t really matter.” Your opinions are often challenged and your everyday beliefs can sometimes be shaken out of their old and trusted spaces. The lines between what you know and don’t know get blurred and a new connection to learning transpires.
I often ramble through life believing that things will never vary. Everything will stay the same. It’ll always be good. Or sometimes it’ll never get better. Or even frequently, this is just what I want. But the truth is that change happens whether we want it or not. Travelling around Africa always gives me focus. This deep, dark, sunny continent full of mystery to me is the epitome of change. It doesn’t meander through life. It crashes in like a lion on the hunt.
This time the universe conspired to constantly involve me with new connections while I travelled. No, I’m not going to come out and confess to a new relationship. I didn’t fly from my paradise island of Mauritius to enter into a new entanglement. What I have in place is more than enough to keep my toes pointed thank you. But I did connect deeply with the little Kingdom of Swaziland. I have been there twice before, talk about a transformation! This is a country that has one foot in the future of technology and one foot deeply planted in the rural African past. It is an area where men use their smartphones to connect with their three wives in different houses. It is an area of beauty and innovation and technology (even though the internet is down almost as often as it is up.) But I will confess that I have come to love Swaziland and its people.
I continued my travels and reconnected with my Mexico. When my book comes out you will see that a lot of my adult life has been shaped by this colourful country with its mariachi music and spicy food that I can’t eat. Here too, you will find a past enmeshed with a future. An Aztec building kidnapped by a church or a Toltec market taken over by the bustle of everyday 21st Century products. It is easy to connect with the best of humanity wrapped in a tradition of revolution.
They say you can never go back to a place you once enjoyed, but Mexico will never just be a place for me. It is a home, a land of wonder, and as I try not to breathe the polluted air too deeply, I know that I belong. I connect and change and move and I become better than I have ever been before. So new connections, come find me because this month I’m looking for you.
