I'm caught in a time warp....

Ok it's 1 am and I still think it's 10 pm........jet lag. I read a book once that had then most beautiful way of describing jet lag. As you fly across the globe your body travels faster than your soul and leaves it behind. Jet lag is the feeling of your empty body waiting for your soul to arrive, like lost luggage. Maybe this explains the torn feeling I experience when I arrive home from traveling; the sadness, the being split in half. It's not the place I feel myself wanting to cling to as I hurdle through the air at 500km/h, it's my soul, the place is irrelevant. Maybe my soul wanted to stay. Or maybe it's scattered all over Canada trying to find itself or experiencing things without my body, so when it eventually does catch up, my travel experience seems more full and positive. When I asked some friends who went traveling about their trip upon first returning they recalled the hastles and annoyances, and now look back fondly on the trip.

Without your soul there is emptiness. With this comes the dread of getting back to your regular life and having to answer the inevitable question "so, how was your trip?" Without your soul this is an almost impossible question to even answer, far less enthusiastically or with any emotion other than sadness. Only mundane details can be recalled, simplistic accounts numbed from the emptiness. Then when you soul does arrive and you are whole again, you remember everything in technicolour and stereo. Vivid sensational memories come flooding back as your soul returns home.
On the outbound journey the emptiness is a longing for home and the familiarity and comfort that comes with that place. You need your soul to fully experience the seeming chaos that is before you, to help you navigate this new place. It is your souless state that makes you want to turn and run, run back onto the plane, return home, give up and abandon your journey. The helpless feeling when you try and find transport from the airport or get hopelessly lost searching for your accommodation or a meal. When your soul arrives here, you are become full of adventure and the new place is no longer chaos but experience waiting to be absorbed; it brings the comfort of home.

As wave of sleep washes over me I feel my soul slowly returning. Maybe tomorrow I will be whole again......or maybe I'll be in Winnipeg.