Going Solo

“Going Solo combines insightful reflections on the art of travel, the immigrant experience, history and expat living to highlight how exposure to new places can sharpen our views on society, politics and spirituality and so help define our identity. By bringing questions of meaning and belonging into focus, journeys invite us to re-evaluate our inner landscape, entrenched beliefs and priorities. Every journey can play a pivotal role in the perpetual process of discovering and molding who we are and so lead us towards a truer version of ourselves. Unfamiliar environments tend also to heighten an awareness of how we’re influenced by history and how we fit into the global landscape. The process seems to hone and attract shared traits amongst travellers: openness to new ideas, curiosity, tolerance, and compassion. Reflecting on John – a fellow senior passenger who’s still going solo aged ninety – the memoir concludes that it’s never too late to start exploring and rewriting the story of who we are. The end echoes the beginning and a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘Those that arrive at the end of a journey are not those that began.’

Digital version available through Amazon: Going Solo: A Travel Memoir in Search of Meaning, Belonging and Identity - Rottenanger, Eva | 9781669830733 | Amazon.com.au | Books