Voice Across
Travel is beautiful, if only there were no goodbyes. What people really want is not to move from one place to another, but to avoid being torn away from where they already belong. Suitcases are packed, tickets are bought, departure times carefully noted, yet the heart’s calendar always lags behind. Leaving is rarely a matter of will; more often it is a necessity. Staying, by contrast, feels like a privilege. A privilege shaped by time, by shared space, by the quiet accumulation of moments.
For nearly two months, we have lived together with our grandchildren, our daughter, and our son-in-law. Time here forgot the hurry of cities. Days brushed against one another gently. Mornings arrived without urgency, evenings settled into place without resistance. Now it is time to leave. The suitcases waiting by the door look slightly out of place, as if they belong to a different life, one that has already begun pulling us away.
Outside, snow keeps falling. On the garden table and chairs, still meant for summer, nearly fifteen centimeters of snow has settled. A winter that covers things designed for warmth. It has been snowing for four or five days now. At times it turns to hail, sometimes to sleet, but mostly it is snow. And yet we are told that snow is rare in the Netherlands. The Gulf Stream, mild winters, temperate climates. Maps, statistics, and habits tell one story. The view from the window tells another. Life, more often than not, pays little attention to theory.
From the living room window, I look out over the lake. It is completely frozen. Cormorants, mallards, geese, and pigeons walk across its surface. Birds accustomed to diving deep for fish now move cautiously over ice, searching for food in narrow cracks. Yesterday’s water is today’s ground. What was once depth has become surface. Nature adapts without nostalgia, without complaint. Perhaps it is not only ice and heavy snow that have grounded airplanes. Entire routines, human and animal alike, have been suspended.
In the distance, the steel-and-wood pedestrian and cycling bridge appears pale, almost erased by snowfall. The opposite shore is no clearer. Distances feel both shorter and longer at once. Snow swallows sound, blurs boundaries. And still, silhouettes of neighbors walking their dogs are visible. Despite the cold, people walk on. Life rarely waits for conditions to improve; it continues in spite of them.
My thoughts drift thousands of kilometers eastward. In eastern Türkiye, news speaks of hundreds of villages cut off from the world. Snow exceeding a meter and a half, ice-covered roads, entire settlements isolated. Schools are closed. Transport halted. Ambulances move only with chains. In some homes, fuel runs low, in others, silence grows heavier. Here, frozen water has become a view. There, snow is a direct confrontation with survival. The same whiteness offers calm in one place and anxiety in another.
And this, of course, is not unique to one country. In similar geographies, similar hardships unfold each winter. In mountainous regions, in places where access depends on a single road, nature asks the same question year after year: Are you prepared? Is there solidarity? Is there a real plan, or merely habits built for good weather? Snow has a way of exposing unpreparedness.
When the snowfall began, a clever neighbor quickly posted an online ad, selling a sled. Opportunity, even in weather. Someone must have bought it. In the distance, a young person glides downhill on it. The same snow that closes schools here becomes a game there. Perhaps this is where the question of fairness quietly emerges. We expect equal emotions in unequal conditions.
More than seven hundred flights were canceled yesterday due to the storm. But it is not only flights that are canceled. Routines are canceled. Certainties are postponed. Plans we thought solid quietly dissolve. The driver who always takes us to the airport called to apologise. His in-law had passed away. Life does not pause for weather, nor for logistics.
Birth, death, loss, and departure proceed without coordination. “I can’t come,” he said. Sometimes, “my condolences” replaces every practical sentence.
A taxi has been arranged. For now, getting to the airport no longer seems impossible. Upstairs, my daughter calls out from her home office. She is working remotely today, another lasting legacy of the pandemic. What once felt like confinement later became possibility. Life teaches not only by taking things away, but by transforming them.
Snow keeps falling. The lake remains frozen. Birds walk where they once swam. The house is warm, yet there is a quiet chill inside, the coolness of an approaching farewell. One cannot help but think about one’s small travel anxieties alongside the far greater immobilities elsewhere in the world. Time moves on, roads reopen, snow eventually melts. But goodbyes remain stubbornly unchanged.
Travel is beautiful. If only there were no goodbyes.
And then the message arrives. SunE… company announces it politely, almost cheerfully: “Wishing you sunny days. Due to heavy snow, your flight has been cancelled.”
Cancelled. Not postponed. Not delayed. Simply erased.
The irony is hard to miss. A wish for sunshine delivered with the news of immobility. A sentence that closes a door while pretending to open a window. When will we fly back home? There is no answer. No alternative time. No new route. Only a brief note informing us that we are entitled to compensation.
Compensation is a curious word. It suggests balance, as if time could be refunded, as if uncertainty could be reimbursed, as if a suspended return could be offset by a number on a screen. It offers money for what is, in truth, an interruption of continuity. Life, once again, is not postponed; it is cancelled for the day, perhaps for several.
So we wait. Not at a gate, not in a queue, but in that familiar in-between state modern life knows well. Plans dissolved, calendars scratched out, certainty deferred. Snow keeps falling. The lake remains frozen. Birds continue walking on ice. Somewhere else, roads remain closed, villages remain isolated, schools remain silent.
And here we are, still between places. Not quite leaving, not quite staying. Travel, it turns out, is not only about movement. It is also about being forced to stop, to sit with uncertainty, to accept that some journeys refuse to obey timetables.
Travel is beautiful. If only it did not insist, every now and then, on reminding us how little control we actually have.