One of the things I learned on my 42-day trip, to 42 places in Douglas Adams novels, for my 42nd birthday, is that travel makes everyone lagged (ship, jet, or otherwise). Even giant silver robots.
Directly after getting where you’re going (often a trial in-and-of-itself), reason, thought, and good sense are at a low ebb. This lag, the extra time it takes to make-new-thinky-gaps… … …makes it seem like a good idea to take long walks and stay awake instead of going horizontal for forty-eight hours.
Don’t misunderstand me: sleep is a very good idea. But if you trust me as your guide, you’ll do that sleeping thing when the sun is down. Even if you haven’t slept in a day or so, if the clocks refuse to point to evening, and the sun appears unwilling to accommodate your needs and go down already, brace yourself for walking for eight or more hours to stay awake until dark.
The walking will overcome the melancholy. The melancholy that seeped into your lagged mind immediately after having safely arrived, solely because you are so very, very tired.
By remaining awake, you’ll have an easier time adjusting to a few facts. The fact that you have time traveled. The fact that the nature of time has radically changed, especially if you are on vacation. The illusion of time generated by your normal work-life balance has melted away, leaving a vast and unbalanced abundance of me-time, us-time, fun-time, and what-the-hell-do-I-do-with-all-this-extra-time?
Some say that it is the newness itself that expands a travelers mind. Not so. It’s just that we are more prone to notice the newness after being shut up in a ship, jet, or otherwise because it is new. Movement in time and space is what creates vast new thinky-gaps inside our brains, even when the matter transference beams don’t miss-fire.
Confronted with the brain-voids from being sloshed about and fed inheuristicable information about places, people, and things, the brain of a traveler can have a bit of a freakout. Embrace the sadness, or the excitement, or both–and Don’t Panic. It’s just the lag.
What do you think?