If you think traveling is
expensive, try staying home. It’ll cost you everything.
Travel, on any budget, changes you. It destroys your old
boundaries, resets your trajectories, and lets you loose in a world where
anything is possible. You’re challenged, and you grow. You come home stronger,
freer, happier, and more alive. Staying home binds you to a provincial way of
seeing and being in the world. Home isn’t bad. In fact it’s pretty great.
You’re right to love it. Yet only when you leave it to venture out into the
wider world do you come to know its true value.
The
first thing that confronts you as you contemplate traveling is fear. What about
all of the things that could go wrong? Can I really afford it? What if I get
lost? What about the language barrier? Am I clever enough to navigate all the
surprises? The thought of traveling triggers every single one of your feelings
of inadequacy. Then you stop, take a breath, and realize that people have been
traveling for tens of thousands of years – you are not the first and you are
certainly not the last. The paths are well-worn. There are scores of strangers
along the road who will help you. You’ve been fortifying your home security
system so long you’ve forgotten that people are inherently generous and kind –
you can count on that. I wonder what else you’ve forgotten.
Once you commit, once you surrender to the journey, all
of your fear is replaced with excitement and wonder. And there’s a life-lesson
for you. Our suffering is mostly generated by our own mistaken thinking. Once
you let go and say yes your misery
lifts like a fog. All that’s left is a warn sun high in the sky lighting the
open road before you.
One of the greatest realizations gained from travel is
the conviction that wherever you are, you are home. More than 95% of humanity
lives outside the United States. Everywhere you go you are in someone’s
hometown. Stop into a tavern. Feel the warmth of a neighborhood. See old
friends strolling arm in arm. Walk through a farmer’s market. Hear piano music drifting
out of an upstairs window. Feel the truth of Robert Louis Stevenson’s words
pull into focus: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is
foreign.” Next thing you know, you’re lingering in a café long after the meal
to swap stories with new friends and fellow travelers, your foreignness washing
away with the wine. Then, walking back to your hotel in the twilight along the
river it finally sinks in – I am as much
at home here as I am in my own home. That’s when it overwhelms you, a
feeling of oneness, of the deep interrelationship of all sentient beings, and of
our primal rootedness in the earth. These realizations are hard to come by back
home. But in a village halfway around the world, they come with your afternoon
tea.
Americans are timid world travelers, but we’re getting
better. In 1990, only 3% of us had a passport. By 1997 that number had risen to
15%. Ten years later it climbed to 27%. And today, an astonishing 42% of
Americans have a passport. We still lag far behind most other countries in per
capita passports, but we’re not as provincial as we used to be. And sure, some
of this is class related – international air travel is a costly privilege not
available to everyone for purely economic reasons. But a few simple adjustments
in most middle class family budgets could make international travel a reality.
Once you make the decision that travel is a core value, you find ways to make
it happen. It dawns on you – I’d rather spend my money on experiences than
things.
Lori and I are putting the finishing touches on our
summer travel plans, a European river cruise with my two older brothers and
their wives – the six of us on the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basil, Switzerland –
a two week vacation when you add in the pre-cruise time in Amsterdam and
post-cruise time in Lucerne. This trip has been two years in the making, and it’s
not the kind of thing we can afford to do very often. But with our parents gone
now we felt like it would be a fitting ritual to return to our ancestral
homeland the Netherlands and spend some quality time slow-cruising up the Rhine
with family. The benefits of river cruising are many. You unpack only once.
Your room travels with you. Every day you wake up in a new town to explore. So
you have the best of both worlds – the stability of consistent lodging, and the
novelty of ever-changing surroundings. You and your travel party have ample
opportunities for planned outings, communal meals, and alone time, as well as chance
conversations over muesli in the morning or sunset drinks on the deck. And
unlike ocean cruising with thousands of people to contend with, these river
boats only hold 200 or so – far more cozy.
If you add up the cost per day, counting air travel and
everything, it’s a pretty scary number. But you cannot measure the value of a
trip by a daily cost average. The fact is, when you go on a trip like this,
every single day of the rest of your life is transformed. How do you count up
that? There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about the glorious two weeks
Lori and I spent in London and Paris last summer. Our lives are immeasurably
enriched because of it. Not everything that counts can be counted.
My relationship with the United States is changing. I’ll
always love my homeland, but it hasn’t felt like home for a while. In some
fundamental ways I don’t recognize her anymore. Her brutality and
unconsciousness frighten me. More and more I see myself as a citizen of the
world. Whenever I travel, I feel affirmed in the feeling that the very idea of
nations is an increasingly outmoded idea, and that our deeper and truer
allegiance ought to be to humanity as a whole, and for all sentient beings, and
for the earth itself. The ugly squalor of nationalism is transcended by the
weave of humanity that knows no borders. From a plane you can’t even see them. Travel
does that to you – everything looks different from out there. Travel shatters
your paradigms and reorients you into the wider cosmos. And that’s priceless.
No comments:
Post a Comment