I had the opportunity to travel recently, part business and part visiting family. It was lovely to visit but I have a love, hate relationship with travel. It takes so much effort. Busy airports, being sat in an airplane for hours with many people around you, long travel days, the list goes on. So, I find myself wondering, is there a better way to travel?
Could it be as easy as stepping through a portal?
In the Word Guardians series, our adventurers can enter different realms simply by walking through a doorway. Could we?
Yeah, you have to have a strong magical ability and a key to the doorway (as detailed in Who can visit the realms of the Word Guardians), but in The Battle for the Peacekeepers, Yas and Sam manage to do just that. They visit Victorian London and ancient Alexandria, and more.
Just imagine the possibilities of simply stepping through a doorway to your destination. You get to skip airport crowds, the waiting, delays and the effort. If all this was possible, where would you choose to go?
The journey is the destination
That old adage of ‘the journey is the destination’ came to me while I was thinking about my answer to ‘where I would go?’. While stepping through to a destination sounds exciting, what you visit and do while there is equally important.
If we just visited a beach, looked out at the sea and then return to our own world, it’s pleasant, but have we really experienced the place? If instead we spend time there, the place starts to become a part of our story, and our experience is richer as a result.
What I’m trying to say is that why you choose to visit somewhere, what the intended story of your visit is and what your experience becomes, is important.
We see this in the Word Guardians realms also. Each realm is formed by readers in the outer world unconsciously collaborating. Their imagination powers magical ink which builds worlds, creates actors and enables stories to play out. When Yas and Sam visit realms, they interact with these worlds and change the storylines. If it fits with what a reader in the outer world might expect to see, then it becomes part of the story.
So, what’s a better way to travel?
I started out in this blog by thinking about how we could avoid the inconvenient parts of modern-day long-distance travel. And I stand by that. Travel takes effort and its toll on us.
If we had the ability to step through a doorway to a destination, that would be amazing, but I don’t believe it’s the complete answer. I think that by being more intentional about the stories we’d like to have when we visit somewhere, that’s an important part of it too. Whether planned or not, that forms a story that we’re part of forever.
Both Yas and Sam, typically have a purpose in mind when visiting a realm but then the story often unfolds in unexpected ways. How they take opportunities and adapt to the changing stories, that’s their story and one that I feel privileged to have been able to imagine and write. To learn more, please buy book one using the link below.
I’d love to hear about your thoughts on travel too. Feel free to send a comment below or by using the contact form. And to journey with Yas and Sam through the realms, read The Battle for the Peacekeepers, available at the link below.
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