A few years ago, I took my daughter on an impromptu trip to Paris, fulfilling a promise I had made to her since she was a little girl. I had the fortune of traveling there for work several times when she was very young, and I ended up falling in love with the city and sharing stories with her about its beauty and magic. As I put her to bed each night during her childhood, I’d often tell her that I wanted to travel with her to Paris when she turned 16 years old, which I saw as a big aspiration. But if you have learned anything about me through this blog, you know that I’m a big dreamer who believes in possibility.
Fast forward to a time when I ended up without a job during a turbulent economic year, and interviewed with a company where I thought the role I applied for was a slam dunk. After getting the call letting me know that they went with another candidate, I hung up in disbelief. My immediate thought was “what will I do now?” and the answer that flashed in my head was “I have the freedom of time and a severance package. What is the one thing I’ve been wanting to do if only I had the time and money?” Paris was the obvious choice, and interestingly enough, my daughter was the ripe age of 16 at the time.
We embarked on the adventure of a lifetime, carefully planning around museum visits, city landmarks, a few restaurants and cafes, and dreamy shopping. All the spots I had been visiting several years prior collided in my head promising a sweet and special time with my best friend in the whole world. I wanted to show her the culture, the sights and sounds of a city that stole my reluctant heart when I first got to see it for the first time. If you asked my daughter to describe me, among the many things she would say is that I’m an overplanner who can get stressed out by a sudden change of plans, and there is quite a bit of truth to it. I make lists, bring a map, plan my outfits according to the weather forecast, build itineraries, and make reservations in advance.
The first day we landed in Paris, we decided to take a stroll to the big shopping boulevard, which I used to know by memory and was eager to show her. However, it had been several years and my mental map was fuzzy. One wrong turn and we were lost in the middle of a busy Parisian street without a map or an active data plan for my phone to help me navigate back. What was intended to be a short and relaxing walk with me as the guide turned into a maze of sidewalks that kept taking us further away from our desired destination. My daughter looked at me in a panic, wondering why on earth I was so cool and collected given the circumstances. She couldn’t recognize the woman who tended to get frazzled by a change of plans and now seemed oblivious to the fact that we did not know where we were or how to get back to our hotel. This was not something that my daughter was used to seeing and she was afraid I had lost my mind.
After fruitlessly walking through streets and arcades, I finally decided that there was one sure way to get back on track, and it was to catch the metro. While I could not remember street names or the right turns to get us to our place, I did know how to get to the metro station in front of our hotel. My daughter was hesitant, thinking that if I could not remember the streets, it would be even harder and riskier if we ended up at the wrong train station. However, I convinced her that I knew what I was doing. I had learned through the years that the rail system is usually more reliable than wandering steps on the pavement. We went down, looked at the map, and purchased our tickets. We followed the signs until we boarded the train and voilà! We were back to our hotel in less than ten minutes.
While the reasons behind our Paris adventure may have seemed frivolous at first as a way for me to escape my professional failure, my daughter and I learned some big lessons during our trip. She and I both realized that we can discover more about who we are once we are untethered from the comforts of our day to day. We had to rely on our resourcefulness and courage to deal with the challenges of being in an unfamiliar place, not speaking the language, and completely dependent on our skills. This helped us bond at a new level, as adults figuring things out and trying new things together. This trip took place as the travel bans were just lifted post-pandemic, and we had to relearn foreign travel under tight restrictions that didn’t exist a few years prior.
As we traversed the streets of Paris, I excitedly saw my daughter’s eyes light up in front of timeless art, beautiful architecture, and interesting fashion. She learned to appreciate the smaller interior spaces of hotel and dining rooms contrasting the exterior expanses of parks and monuments. And this offered an even bigger contrast to the generous American spaces where one’s closet can be the size of a bedroom somewhere else – no exaggeration here. Towards the end of our trip, she was the one navigating us through the metro lines, now very familiar with the travel directions and major stations that punctuated our itineraries. She told me that she had learned more during that trip than through her entire school year, and the reason was that she expanded her horizons beyond what she knew at the time while developing life skills on foreign terrain. If I had the chance to use travel as a didactic, eye-opening experience for any learner, that would be a life calling I would take in a heartbeat. But in the meantime, I will settle for little adventures here and there, where we can get outside our daily habits and explore the big world that has much to show us about ourselves and others.
At the end of our trip, the relationship with my daughter had grown richer as we became complicit in our little quirks and habits. We got lost in Paris more than once and had to jump off trains too crowded with passengers while we were still uncomfortable with lack of social distance. We had to warn each other when we felt a stranger was following us too closely, getting more and more expert about reading each other’s eyes and facial expressions. We developed inside jokes and secret codes for likes and dislikes. The trip ended up being an investment, a bet we took while I figured out my next professional steps. Three days after we landed back in the US, I serendipitously came across a job post that became my next role, and the Paris adventure became the perfect bridge between past disappointment and brand new hope. I wouldn’t have planned it better even if I tried, and for that reason I trust in having a list of possibilities to jump into when I have the chance, ready to meet the moment. Dreaming gets us ready to recognize what we truly want when that thing finally shows itself to us. If that other job that was clearly not meant for me had “panned out” I would not have this beautiful memory of bonding and learning with my daughter, a precious gift that will last us a lifetime.
I do realize that not everybody is willing or able to travel, or to use travel as a way to learn more about themselves and the world. I still think, however, that exploring different cultures, artforms, cuisines, and most importantly – ideas, even if we stay put where we are can help us grow in new ways and increase our understanding and empathy toward ourselves and others. Wherever you are and whatever you do in life, I wish you pursue beautiful dreams that take you on happy trails.
