It was, in retrospect, a moment of innocent optimism that led me to believe that losing momentum was going to be a good thing when we got home at 2:30am on a Sunday, after just over 24 hours of travel. (Well, a lot of that included an extended layover in JFK airport, but you know what I mean.) My head at the time was exhausted, sure, but also buzzing the way it does after I’ve been on the go for too long, as if it was literally in motion despite what the rest of my body was doing. I felt dizzy and tired, and I remember thinking to myself, finally, we get to stop. I get to stop for awhile.
Turns out, that wasn’t a good thing, after all.
Don’t get me wrong; not traveling has been great — as much as the UK trip was filled with good things and family and a lot that I’m already looking back on fondly, it felt like almost constant motion: even on the rare occasions when it wasn’t a day when I was traveling somewhere or about to, my brain was in the mode of, “okay, but in a couple of days, we have to catch this car to get to this airport” and so on. Not having that in the back of my mind for the last few days as I write has been wonderful.
The problem is, I’ve realized that I’ve also lost the momentum of my everyday life, and that’s a hard one to deal with. It’s not simply the jet lag, which took a couple of days to arrive and then stuck around like a bad smell; it’s that I spent the first week or so back struggling to get through my workday, because I’d lost the weird rhythm that I’ve become used to. That week off — actually just three and a half days, as it turned out, but a lot happened in those three and a half days — broke all the everyday magic spells I’d unthinkingly constructed to travel through the day easily, and everything for those days just felt impossibly, unreasonably hard.
“I’ve lost momentum,” I’d tell anyone who asked, feeling the irony in those words even as they came out my mouth.