Travel Bits: March 2021

Sorting out my travel memorabilia.......

As international travel remains curtailed, I decided that it was time to take a weekend to sort out and clear up my study which now also serves as my home office while the new normal of "working from home" (a.k.a. WFH) continues into its second year.

Being someone who cherishes a neat and tidy environment, I naturally have all my books, documents and other stuff neatly arranged and displayed on the shelves lining the walls of the small room which is my study. However, with WFH taking its toll on the daily-in-use home office, stuff naturally got built up after 15 months of working from home daily, 7 days a week. The result was small piles of documents, books, magazines, work materials, letters, memos, notes and online purchases stacking up first, at the corners and then the corners-of-the-corners as space around the small room quickly ran out. That was when I decided a day of area-cleaning had become necessary.

As I got around sorting out these new and somewhat self-generating piles of stuff, I gradually came across many memorabilia collected from my past travels. Many of these were on-the-spur purchases but not all. Included among these memorabilia were travel guides, maps of places I visited, posters of tourists attractions (including some posters of local flora and fauna), old boarding passes, old issues of airline magazines and even theatre programmes which had somehow found themselves a home in my study. The hand-written notes that I had scribbled on some of these during those trips added to the personal allure and memories of these items.

Small and relatively insignificant items to others but filled with meanings and memories to me. After ruffling through many of these items and enjoying the reminiscences of many previous trips, some and then many of them gradually went into the trash bags. Time to clear some physical clutter, commit the experiences to memories, store most away as digital photographs as well as physical written notes and move on. 

Clearing spaces and editing myself for when things do eventually return to normal. When? I don't believe anyone really knows for sure. Maybe one year on from now, I will read back on this blog post and reminisce on my thoughts today when I wrote this article.

My passport and boarding pass for my last business trip abroad before international border restrictions began due to the COVID pandemic.