When I was little, I’d get deathly carsick. As a kid I read constantly, and it was hard for me to put down the book.
But I think it was good for me to have to look out the window instead of always at the pages of a book.
Maybe it’s even why I became a reporter, and got hooked on traveling. Once I stopped depending on reading for my entertainment, and started taking the outward view, I saw how strange and amazing the world was – and I couldn’t stop.
Seems strange that looking out the window, rather than reading, would prevent the motion sickness. But apparently it’s that the close focusing sets up a contradiction that the body can’t deal with. The body feels motion, but the car’s interior and the book are still, and this conflict creates the nausea.
There’s a similar feeling, I have found, that I get from reading old journals or emails, or spending too much time with my old travel photos. I get mentally nauseated by the flood of memory.
It is not the movement backward in time, over waves of emotion, that gives me that sick feeling. I enjoy nostalgia when I am just skimming the surface.
It’s sinking into those waves, being immersed in the past where I don’t belong, that makes me feel like I’m drowning.
Focused too closely on something that is no longer moving.
Day 119 is a 2015, in honor of living in the present.
