You Can Take the Girl Out of London...

Sometimes a seed of nostalgia gets planted - an idea, a destination, a feeling - and it grows in the silent background of our daily lives until it pulls us back in time, demanding attention. After stalled projects triggered a stretch of summer frustration that made me want to throw my laptop through the wall like a shiny black Frisbee, I craved creative refreshment and I was certain I'd find it in London.

I've lived in England twice in my life, but it has lived in me almost constantly. I spent a year in London as a child and loved it. Its atmosphere and inspirations caught me at such an impressionable time that they became life-long companions and playthings for my muse. Later, as a graduate student in Yorkshire, I was enchanted by the layers of story and history woven through the northern landscape. When I left, I assumed I'd be back every year to visit the place that seemed to feed my imagination more reliably than any other. I was wrong: It took until this autumn, 11 years later, for me to get back. By then, what used to be a steady source of bright inspiration had shifted into the shadows.

The craving for a creative re-charge led me to the London neighborhood where I'd lived at age 7 (Remember the romantic comedy Notting Hill, with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant? Painted shop fronts, hidden gardens, and the artichokes-to-antiques bustle of the Saturday street market? THAT neighborhood). I wanted to be back at the house where I'd read with abandon for the first time and written my first “book;” I wanted to see the brick primary school where I spent second grade and had a gray-haired headmistress who made sure each student had something to read everyday that didn't have anything to do with class work; I wanted to peek through the hedges at the communal garden (the same hidden garden featured in Notting Hill); and I wanted to find the library where I discovered Narnia and Middle Earth, and the adventure that could lie, with deceptive calm, between two book covers.

Wanting all of that, the neighborhood had become a fantasy land, and the square white house had grown, in my mind, into a glistening castle at the center of it.

The house did still have features I remembered: a simple black railing, cracked black and white tiles on the steps, a hint of the garden beyond. But it wasn't covered in fairy-dust, it had no flag-topped turret, and there wasn't a sign outside that declared, “She found her imagination here.” It was just an ordinary house.

I wanted more - I wanted the remembered magic to infuse me with inspiration. But although traveling on a nostalgia passport means searching for what you've left behind, the only way it can be satisfying is if you are willing not to find it, and perhaps to find something else instead. After a while of “this is it?” and “what's next,” I could see that my nostalgia was not for the experiences of the past. It was about my dreams and ambitions then. However fantastical they may have been, they had energy and freedom. And it was that soaring enthusiasm that I wanted to connect with.

The truth, of course, is that the seeds of irrepressible inspiration were never planted in the house, the garden, the school, the library or any other part of London. They were sown in me, as they are in all of us. Shadowing my 7-year-old self reminded me of that. I could feel how much of what that creative kid in red Mary-Janes wanted then still means something to me now.

I realized too that all travel is time travel. When we change where we are in space, we also change where we are in time. Travel alters the rhythms of our bodies, the pace and patterns of what we see, and our awareness of our own personal seasons. And if we are lucky, we also change our deepest selves, quickening the beat of our creative hearts.
 

Sharon Abra Hanen is a writer, creativity coach, and nostalgic traveler who seeks inspiration in layers of story and history. She explores connections between experience, memory, and the creative life at wellfedpoet.wordpress.com.