A Season of Stillness, Travel, and Learning to Move Differently

Written by Joni Roberts

Traveler, storyteller, and public health advocate

There are seasons of travel where you collect destinations, and then there are seasons where the places you’re in quietly collect you.

This has been one of those seasons.

Being in Malawi — and moving through other parts of the world before arriving here — has slowed me down in ways I didn’t expect. Not dramatically, not all at once, but gently. Enough to notice how much of my everyday life back home is shaped by urgency. Enough to feel what happens in my body when that urgency falls away.

The pieces that follow are reflections from that slowing.

They’re about travel, but not in the aspirational sense. They’re about rest, pace, and readiness. About how our bodies respond to simplicity, stress, and choice. About what everyday life — money, safety, intimacy, culture — reveals when you’re living somewhere long enough to stop performing the experience.

Some of these essays are quiet. Others are funny. Some hold tension. All of them are rooted in lived moments: sitting by Lake Malawi at sunrise, navigating a lost passport, being questioned for choosing independence, laughing in kitchens, pausing in clinics.

This isn’t a guide to Malawi. It’s not a checklist for travel. And it’s not a manifesto. It’s a season of noticing.

Of paying attention to what becomes possible when life slows down enough for the body to catch up — and what those moments teach us about how we want to move through the world, wherever we are.