Covid-19 and Dealing with Travel Anxiousness

For people who are fond of travelling, it's not easy to just sit at home and not become anxious about future travel. I am among those people who didn't feel anything particularly anxious in the first three months of home quarantine. But the fourth month started becoming a burden and I couldn't help but be anxious about the future.

In an effort to deal with that anxiousness, I started looking for help and around the same time a friend from work shared an interesting link: To Spark Hope for the Future, Ask These Three Questions

In a nutshell, you write answers to three ordinary questions and you are supposed to feel better. Initially, I dismissed it as yet another psychology mumbo-jumbo. However, one night reluctantly when I couldn't stop thinking about future, I gave it a try. And it worked!! I am better at dealing with my travel anxiousness and those answers have a calming effect when I go through them.

I am sharing my answers to those questions and hoping that it inspires you write your own too.

### What’s one thing you’re looking forward to doing in the future, that isn’t possible (or advisable) today due to the current pandemic?

Travel to far-off and remote places in mountains with a car and then walk around the area to see nature that feeds my soul and makes me “feel” something.

### Why are you looking forward to it?

The act of walking in mountains is incredibly slow and it takes time to reach from one place to another. And once that is done, as a reward the views are spectacular. This gives me a break from instant gratification and serves as a reminder to trust in the process more than the outcome.

Walking in the mountain is also challenging and I come out of it feeling inspired and confident of my body that it can handle so much stress.

### Now picture yourself doing this activity again, in the post-pandemic future, as vividly as you can. What time of day is it? What is the weather like? Where are you and what do you see around you? Who are you with? How do you feel? Most importantly - when you imagine this moment, what do you think will be different about it, compared to pre-pandemic times? Try to identify at least one specific detail that will be changed as a result of our pandemic experiences. Imagine this detail of change vividly – how do you experience this change in terms of what you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch? How are you adapting to this change? (And if you don’t think anything will change when you get back to doing this activity – look closer, for even the tiniest detail of difference in the environment, or your actions, or other people’s behaviour.)

It’s early morning. The sun is just about to rise in the sky. We are parking the car in a car park and we have the lunch and water in our backpacks, camera charged. We feel excited and a bit anxious too because we haven’t done the walk yet and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Will the weather co-operate? Will the views be majestic? These are the questions that I want to find answers to and want to hit the trail as soon as possible. But I also don’t want to rush. As a result of the pandemic, maybe we will keep our distances from the fellow hikers and we might be little wary of spending the night in the hut. When they greet us on the trail, we will have more distance than the usual. When we reach at the huts, we won’t be sitting close. We also expect less talking.