Exhausted by Travel, Addicted to Motion
By day three of any trip, I’m exhausted by travel but addicted to movement.
The logistics drain me—navigating airports, deciphering train schedules, finding food that won’t make me sick. My body aches from unfamiliar beds, my mind buzzes with constant translation, constant decision-making about routes and restaurants and whether it’s safe to drink the water.
But underneath this surface exhaustion runs something electric, something that makes me book the next journey before I’ve recovered from the last one.
I realized the difference while watching Happy pack for our weekend trip to Sylhet. She moves with efficiency, folding clothes with the practiced ease of someone who’s learned to travel light. But there’s something in her expression—a particular brightness that appears only when we’re preparing to go somewhere together. Not happiness exactly, but aliveness.
Travel exhausts the body but awakens something deeper—some ancient part of us that remembers when movement meant survival, when staying still too long meant death, when the horizon always held the possibility of better hunting grounds or safer shelter.
We’re exhausted by the machinery of modern travel—security lines and boarding passes and crowded terminals. But we’re energized by the deeper truth that movement represents: that we are not fixed, that our circumstances can change, that tomorrow we can wake up somewhere else and be someone slightly different.
The irony is that most of our movement now is circular. We travel to return. We go away to come home. We move through space only to end up in the same place, carrying different memories but living the same life.
Yet something in us needs this proof of mobility. Even when we can’t afford to travel far or often, even when the destinations disappoint us, even when we spend more time planning trips than taking them—we need to know that we could leave if we wanted to.
I think about the migrants who walk for days through desert and mountains, carrying everything they own, exhausted beyond measure but driven by the desperate energy of movement toward something better. Their exhaustion and their drive to keep moving come from the same source: the biological imperative that says motion equals hope.
The businessman I met on the train to Chittagong travels every week for work. “I hate it,” he said. “The hotels, the delays, the loneliness.” But when I asked if he’d take a desk job, he immediately said no. “I need to move,” he explained. “Staying in one place too long makes me feel dead.”
Maybe travel exhaustion and movement addiction are the same phenomenon—our modern bodies rebelling against our nomadic souls, our settled lives in tension with our migratory instincts.
The exhaustion is real: jet lag and sore feet and constant vigilance in unfamiliar places. But the energy is also real: the electric feeling of possibility that comes from changing geography, even temporarily.
We collapse into familiar beds after trips, grateful for our own pillows and the predictability of home routines. But within days, we’re scrolling through flight prices again, drawn by the intoxicating possibility of waking up somewhere else.
What if we’re not exhausted by travel but by the gap between our need for movement and our capacity for it?
