Slow travel

It never takes long to correct. There are things to see and do nearby, places I would be mad to miss, and lots of encouragement from everybody else who has seemingly managed to fit everything into their visit. So why does having an empty day arrive with such pressure – real or imagined – not to leave it that way? Having nobody else’s plans to accommodate is one thing, yet even when I am travelling alone, there is a peculiar pressure to constantly be doing something. After all, I’ve paid to travel halfway around the world, where doing nothing begins to look and feel like a shameful waste of the opportunity.

The opportunities that travel offers us have never been more accessible, or less mysterious. We can plan an itinerary from a phone, compare hundreds of accommodation options in minutes and arrive almost anywhere with directions already waiting for us. Every stage of the journey has become easier to organise, yet every stage now competes for our attention, and the next destination can begin calling before we have fully experienced the one beneath our feet.

Attention has become one of travel’s quietest casualties. Perhaps that is why some places – not the ones that whisked by in transit – remain with us long after we have returned home. Their significance extends beyond activity. They create the conditions for sustained attention, allowing us to observe rather than consume, to linger rather than move on, and to appreciate a place on its own terms. Hours pass differently and we measure distance, especially from home, on a different scale. The ‘where’, as opposed to the ‘what’, becomes worthy of our full attention. But at the expense of …?

Sustaining that attention can be surprisingly difficult. Modern life has become extraordinarily effective at claiming it, and travel has not escaped that reality. The same technology that allows us to explore the world with remarkable ease also encourages us to keep moving, keep searching and keep looking ahead. Attention becomes fragmented, shared between the place we are standing in and the countless distractions that travel alongside us.

Perhaps an empty day gives our attention somewhere to settle. We notice the doorway we would otherwise have walked through on the way to somewhere else. We can stay longer because nothing is waiting after it, return somewhere simply because we liked it, or change direction without calculating what that will do to the rest of the itinerary.

That last part may be the difficult one. Travel has become extraordinarily good at giving us things to do, but we have also become very good at measuring a journey by what we have done. A day without an achievement or an attraction can feel strangely unproductive. Perhaps the pressure is not simply to use our time wisely and well, but to have evidence that we have used it productively … as though doing nothing but soaking it all in is no longer a valid reason for being somewhere new and different. Somewhere else.

Of course there are practical reasons to plan, and leaving space does not require abandoning common sense. It simply means resisting the assumption that every remaining hour must then be allocated. Perhaps that is where slow travel becomes less about how long we stay somewhere and more about what we ask of the time we have. Seven days do not become slow simply because we refuse to make plans, but nor does slowing down necessarily require seven weeks. Sometimes it may begin with waking up, discovering there is nowhere we need to be and deciding that the situation does not require correcting.

Today, my day ahead is completely empty. Perhaps that was the plan after all.