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.
No comments:
Post a Comment