Sometimes Moving Forward Looks suspiciously Like Going Back

Many lifetimes ago in Kenya, my working life began in tourism. I started as a junior booking agent for a GSA representing names like TWA, Singapore Airlines, and British Caledonian - two of which have since disappeared into aviation history. From there, I launched a new tour division at another agency, rose to Assistant Travel Manager in another, and eventually opened my own safari company: Rock & Tide Safaris (RATS).

Travel wasn't simply a job. I loved it.

Then life did what life does.

It brought me to Canada, into entrepreneurship, and into twenty years of running an education business. It took me through raising children, building businesses, managing teams, surviving the pandemic, and eventually selling my business - only to face that rather uncomfortable question:

What now?

Over the past year, part of the answer slowly emerged. I went back to writing. I started working on my memoir, returned to essays and fiction, and began building SanjitKInk.com - a home for the stories and observations I've accumulated along the way.

And now, another old love has unexpectedly returned.

Long before worksheets, entrepreneurship, and memoirs, travel was my world. Decades later, I’ve officially returned to the industry as a TICO-certified Travel Advisor affiliated with Fora Travel.

This time, though, I'm returning differently.

I've travelled more. I've lived more. I've raised a family, immigrated, built and sold a business. I've learned that the best journeys aren't necessarily the ones with the longest itineraries or the most impressive hotels.

 They're the ones that mean something.

For me, writing and travel belong together. Travel gives a writer an inexhaustible supply of people, places, mishaps, observations, history, food, and cultural collisions. Writing lets me make sense of it all. One lets me explore the world; the other lets me understand it.

I’m particularly drawn to helping people plan those purposeful journeys: honeymoons, milestone trips, women travelling independently, African safaris, Indian Ocean escapes, retreats, and voyages that mark the beginning or end of a life chapter or milestone.

At this stage of life, I thought I was supposed to choose what came next. Instead, two of the things I loved at the very beginning have somehow found their way back to me.

Maybe I wasn't starting over after all. Maybe I was finally bringing the different parts of my life together.

Sometimes a full circle isn't going backwards at all. Funny how life does that.

After twenty years of worksheets, that's not a bad full circle at all.

Photo: Borobudur Buddhist Temple, Java, Indonesia - Dec 2018. Author’s collection.