Friday 21 October 2016

thoughts on travel

by Chi


“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

We’re sitting on stools in a West End bar, sipping on beers and trying to guess the accent of a foreigner nearby making uproarious conversation with a bunch of similarly scruffy, tanned folk. The plastic Dymocks bag beside him holds a recently-purchased guide book that reveals plans to travel to the Philippines. We sat there, and I think we were both thinking about being boxed into Brisbane, and wanting break out of that box. My friend was raring to smash down the glass walls of his limited experience. In this day and age, you can see everything through those glass walls – all the way to Nepal, to Russia, to Guatemala. And what I think we both knew, but couldn’t grasp, is that that box was in our minds. Because those tourists were in the same place as we were, but they were seeing something we couldn’t see.

“My body is a spaceship that my mind travels the universe in.” Ruby Book

Needless to say, travelling is more than just a holiday on a tropical island – it’s a mindset, an internal shift, a lifestyle. It’s slipping into an ephemeral stream of experiences and being tasked, senses honed and sharpened, only with one job – to experience. The experiencing doesn’t happen in a vacuum: it makes you alive to the diversity in the human race and the enduring mystery of this planet and attunes you to the truth of the idea that there are multifarious but equally valid ways of interpreting the world. That is why most of us travel.

However, you don’t necessarily have to fly thousands of miles to reap the benefits. Plonking yourself in a far-flung corner of the world does bring out certain qualities in you because you're forced to be outside your net of familiarity, but deep down you’re always capable of changing your outlook on life. As Jonah Lehrer pointed out in his beautiful piece “Why We Travel”, the act itself is more important than the destination. It doesn’t really matter where you go.

Whenever you’re feeling tied up with work, ill health, a bank account balance in the negatives or are generally just pinned by your circumstances in a town that stifles and that chance alone has decreed your “home”, just remember – you have the capability to replicate that feeling you get when you travel and inhabit that bigger, brighter version of yourself, wherever you are. Pale as reality may seem. (Also remember – chance could have dealt you a way shittier hand. Think of the millions of refugees right now, suspended in a tented limbo on the borders of a hysterical and hostile Europe).

For many of us, reality is suburbia, which is the epitome of mundanity. It’s the height of unculturedness and conformity. Day by day, the sound of lawnmowers bores away at our souls and our drive and creativity. However, there’s a reason why suburbia has been explored in so many seminal pieces of pop culture, like American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides and Lorde’s Pure Heroine. There are nuances to not travelling, to staying put; subtler feelings, like nostalgia, that are best and most poetically conveyed through art (my favourite kind of art). You can make anything sound beautiful if you use the right words. If Lorde can fool me into falling in love with “these roads where the houses don’t change”, then there’s hope yet for the drudgery of our daily lives.

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” Dagobert D Runes

There was a homeless man in Kathmandu who showed my friend around town. There was a man on a train in Thailand who waxed philosophical, to that same friend, about all he’d learned during his tumultuous life. These stories aren’t the stories of free spirits, released from the shackles of society and granted only to backpackers. They are human stories, and I guarantee everyone has them. My parents, the refugees, have them. The world would be a much different place if people taught themselves to be as open, curious, vulnerable and trusting as they are in hostels – wouldn’t it?

"We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic to creativity. When we get home, home is still the same, but something in our minds has changed, and that changes everything.” Jonah Lehrer, “Why We Travel”, Panorama Magazine, 2009

Although I’m not bemoaning the fact that, for the first time ever in human history, the world is digitally interconnected to an insane degree (I love my screensaver of bungalows in Tahiti and my handy online guide to avoiding social faux pas in Austria), it does mean that sightseeing loses a little of its allure. A lot of the time I find that the real thing, while still cool, doesn’t measure up to the hype and inflated expectations generated by Google Images. Many things are better when stored in the imagination, and the Eiffel Tower is no exception. And it seems to me that the tourist hordes who swing by some great monument just to snap a five-second selfie before getting back on the bus are proof of that.

As the Duffer brothers, creators of the show Stranger Things, somewhat nostalgically recalled in an interview with Vulture magazine, the 80s was a time where “it felt like you really could get lost on a grand adventure”, simply by going off with your friends – without cell phones or the Internet. That’s the charm, I guess, of not knowing everything. Imagine the magic of hearing only vague descriptions of the Sagrada Família without ever having seen a picture of it. The craziness of it would seriously blow you away. Point is, distance is all about perspective. And how you perceive your surroundings is all about perspective.

Everytime you’re under a new patch of sky, everytime you’re wooed by unfamiliar stars, you’re travelling. Even if it is just a three hour car’s ride away, it’s still a new part of the world, isn’t it? These sprawling coastlines map terrain your shoes have never touched; these wild beaches you’ve declared to be unbeatable throughout the world, after baking on and drinking mojitos on Spanish beaches dotted with tanned rears and tireless hawkers. Where you live is of incomparable beauty – travellers from abroad come from miles away to be awed by the shores you take for granted. Then again, maybe this shift in perspective – appreciating with fresh eyes the new in the old – is only possible once you’ve been away from home. Humans are such paradoxical creatures.

So, travel whenever you can or want to – just try to seal that accompanying sense of wonder and gratitude inside you. The world is a book, after all, and those who do not travel read only one page. But I’d rather read one page and take something really important out of it than skim them all and find, after I’ve closed the covers, that I’ve learned nothing at all.

“It's like people who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book




No comments:

Post a Comment