by Sukriti Taneja
There’s a folder on my laptop called ‘Someday’.
Inside it, you’ll find half-baked itineraries to faraway cities, screenshots of Airbnb’s I’ll probably never book, bookmarked travel blogs, and a map dotted with pins that feel more like diary entries than destinations.
It’s a strange kind of travel, this wishful wandering. You picture yourself in streets you’ve never walked, sipping coffee in cafés you’ve never entered, learning the curve of a coastline only through Google Earth. Sometimes, it’s enough. Sometimes, it’s a reminder of all the pauses I’ve postponed.
Because here’s the thing: life rarely hands us a pause button.
In our 20s, we are constantly sprinting. Career-building, rent-paying, dream-chasing, ‘networking’, figuring out who we are while curating who we appear to be. We join the invisible club of ‘dreamers, believers, and doers’, and then work overtime to justify our membership. We convince ourselves we’re building toward something bigger, but in the process, we quietly shelve the things that made us feel alive.
We don’t mean to. We just keep thinking, I’ll go next year. I’ll take that trip when I have enough savings. I’ll do it when things calm down at work. But ‘next year’ comes with new deadlines. ‘Enough savings’ moves like a mirage, and ‘things calming down’ is a fantasy our calendars like to tease us with.
My own ‘someday’ list has its regulars. A trip to Dubai with my mom has been six years in the making, postponed by mismatched schedules, a global pandemic, my master’s degree, and a few health scares. And yet, the list of things to do there keeps growing. Atlantis Water Park’s slides get yet another view on YouTube from my IP address, as if I’m trying to memorise them for a test I’ll never take.
Then there’s Amsterdam, the birthday trip I’ve been planning for the last three years. It remains stubbornly locked away, much like Anne Frank once was, and I can only hope that one day, I’ll get to set that plan free.
The problem with unattended wishes is that they ferment into something heavier. At first, it’s just a faint restlessness. Then, it becomes resentment toward the job, the city, the obligations, even the people we love. We forget that the resentment isn’t about them. It’s about all the little explorers inside us who’ve been grounded for too long.
Adulthood, I’ve learned, is not a single peak you climb. It’s a mountain range called Responsibility, with no clear summit. Somewhere under its layers of bills, meetings, groceries, commutes, and social obligations, there’s still a version of you, the one who thought nothing of catching a midnight train just because it was cheaper, who ate ice cream for breakfast without thinking about lactose intolerance, who saw detours not as inconveniences but as part of the story.
That younger self doesn’t disappear. They become a stowaway, tucked deep in your chest, waiting for a break in the noise. You’ll notice them when you’re scrolling through old photos, or when you smell something that takes you back to a summer in a city you loved, or when you watch someone else take the trip you’ve been planning in your head for years.
Sometimes, it’s not even about the destination. It’s about reclaiming the feeling. The one where time expands, where you’re allowed to be curious instead of productive, where you can linger in a moment without thinking about what comes next.
The more I think about it, the more I realise: a pause doesn’t have to be a plane ticket. It can be a day spent wandering a neighbourhood you’ve never explored in your own city. It can be a long coffee alone, phone face down, letting your mind travel somewhere else entirely. It can be saying no to a weekend of ‘catching up on work’ in favour of catching up with yourself.
Because here’s the quiet truth: the world won’t stop for you to take a breath. You have to decide to stop. And when you do, even for a moment, you’ll find that the stowaway still knows the way to joy. They’ll tug at your sleeve, point at something ordinary, the colour of the evening sky, the sound of a street musician, the warmth of a stranger’s smile, and remind you why you ever wanted to explore in the first place.
Maybe this is what wishful travel is really about. Not just the dream of going somewhere new, but the act of keeping that dream alive, even when life feels like it’s moving in fast forward. It’s a promise to the younger you, the one with the backpack, the wide eyes, the relentless hope, that you won’t forget them, even if the world tries to make you.
Perhaps one day, we will tick off every place on our lists. Or maybe not.
But along the way, we can choose to collect small departures, the kind that don’t require visas, just intention. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: you can’t always control the big adventures, but you can always give yourself a little room to roam.
So, here’s to the pauses we create for ourselves. The detours we allow. The moments when we let the stowaway take the lead.
And here’s to that folder called ‘Someday’, may it never be empty, and may it never be forgotten.