Why Travel Matters

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.

We Are Always Traveling

We are traveling 1,000 miles an hour around the center of the earth. The earth is traveling 67,000 miles an hour around the sun – nineteen miles per second. The sun and its solar system are spiraling around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 550,000 miles an hour. The Milky Way galaxy is flying away from the center of the universe like everything else since the Big Bang, scattering everything outward in all directions.

            Does it feel like you’re hurtling through space at nineteen miles per second? Of course not. Because we were born on the fly. We’re used to it. This is all we’ve ever known. We were born traveling.

            The best DNA and archeological evidence shows that modern humans, Homo sapiens, walked out of Africa 50,000 - 80,000 years ago. Earlier hominid species existed long before that. In fact, just a few miles from my home in San Diego, definitive evidence of human activity dating back 130,000 years was recently discovered, shattering earlier estimates of humanity’s arrival in the New World by a factor of ten. For our entire evolution, humans were never much good at staying put. That distant horizon is far too alluring.

            As we prepare for our summer excursions, a brief reflection on the philosophy of traveling is in order. Why are we called out from our domestic tranquility to rough it on the road? What lures us toward the unknown? And why, as soon as we get home, do we once again begin dreaming of far off lands? Maybe it’s because we are more at home on the road than we are at home. We have always been traveling.

            Before you step out the door, traveling teaches you its first important lesson. It happens during the process of packing – the art of reducing your material life down to a few bags you can sling over your shoulder and drag behind you. When you wake up at home and get dressed, you have all of your clothes to choose from. On the road, you have only what you can carry. Packing reduces your life down to its essentials – it is an exercise in decisiveness and commitment. You don’t need to choose a specific outfit for every day of travel, but you do need to assemble a small number of things that work well together, and are suitable to the elements. You need to know where you’re going and adapt accordingly. Black tie dinner and the opera house? Rainforest camping? Back-pack train hopping through India? As in life, know yourself, know your environment, and know your cultural context. Make a decision and live with it.

            The best trips, like the best lives, are well-balanced endeavors with just the right amount of planning and the just the right amount of spontaneity. Over-planning turns your trip into a chore, death-marching from one fixed appointment to the next. Under-planning creates even more stress as you squander precious vacation time navigating simple arrangements that could’ve been better handled from home. As in life, failing to plan is planning to fail. But nobody likes a task-master either. Leave open, unstructured days sandwiched between your plane tickets and hotel reservations. You never know. You might find yourself passing through a village that barely earned a mention in the guide book. You walk its cobblestoned streets and stop into an empty café at the end of the day. At a window table, sipping the best espresso you have ever had in your life, watching the alpenglow bathe the rooftops in gold, a wordless recognition passes through you even though you have never been here before. You know you can’t leave. Not yet. Not today. You find a room at the local inn. That night a festival in the town square brings out the entire village. You mingle with the crowd, hearing in their voices and seeing in their eyes something familiar, something true, something real. Among these strangers you feel a warmth and belonging that eludes you back home. The strangeness of the world takes off its mask and reveals its oneness. You can’t plan moments like this. Nor can you seek them. They find you only when you aren’t looking, and only if you leave openings. Mystery and beauty cannot enter where there is no space.

Some of us write travel journals. A lot of us take pictures or videos. These are all wonderful ways to interact with your experiences, mold them into art, or at least record your memories for later enjoyment. But those of us who journal or photograph our travels are well aware of the subtle and insidious effect these processes have on the very experiences they supposedly celebrate and enshrine. I call it the camera effect.

            If you love taking pictures as much as I do, you find yourself constantly scanning the environment for the next shot. Standing in the middle of Yosemite Valley, instead of experiencing Yosemite Valley, you’re obsessed with how to best capture an image of Yosemite Valley. Instead of controlling the camera, the camera controls you.

At their best photography and travel journaling connect us to a place and create lasting works of beauty and value. At their worst they rob of us the very experience we traveled so far to enjoy. As a photographer I’m always cognizant of the light – its direction, its texture, and its impact on color saturation. Atmospheric haze, shadow, and a hundred other variables crowd my mind. I’m always scanning for interesting compositions, angles, and juxtapositions. I’m seeking the emblematic image – something that will capture the entire zeitgeist of a place and time. In other words, I’m enfolded in layer after layer of insulating interpretation – stuck in my head essentially – instead of really truly being here now. Sigh.

            Same with journaling. Often in the midst of an experience I think to myself, this is how I’ll describe this tomorrow morning over coffee when I write my journal entry about this, and standing in the middle of Versailles, I’m lost in a descriptive word-cloud about Versailles. What a shame. Zen Buddhism often reminds us of the dangers of getting lost in abstraction, and how the mediation of thought blankets the immediacy of life with numbing distance. As 17^th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho so poignantly put it: “Even in Kyoto/Hearing the cuckoo’s cry/I long for Kyoto.”

              The purpose of travel, and of the well-lived life, is to free us of our complacency, rip away our mooring, and cast us adrift into the wonder of it all. Only when we leave the safety of the shore do we experience the immensity of the sea. The sailboat was not made for the harbor.

Big Sur

            Big Sur is impossible. It should not exist. But there it is.

            A crazy road clinging to the cliffs between San Simeon and Carmel. Lapis lazuli waters with sea otters at play. Grey fox pups peering up through the poppies. High above, California condors, back from the brink of extinction, set their ten foot wingspans like sails on the salty updraft. Far below, the plumes of Blue whales spout like geysers.

            Highway 1 was built through these treacherous coastal gorges by convict labor in the years after World War I. It was a simple deal – in exchange for a day on the road crew they cut a day off your sentence. That one misstep could send you pummeling down a thousand foot cliff to your death was better odds than another day in the exercise yard at San Quentin.

The army needed access to the coast to create a frontline defense on the western edge of the country. So congressional funding appeared. War is funny like that. It creates both a sense of urgency and unintended consequences. Were it not for the fear of invasion by sea on this lonely stretch of unprotected west coast, the Big Sur Highway would have never been built. What would have all those peace-loving hippies at Esalen done then?

            The central coast of California has its own personality, its own soul, and its own undefinable borders. Some say central California is everything north of Santa Barbara and south of Monterrey. Others push the southern edge down to Ventura and the northern edge up to San Francisco. But one thing is sure. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.

            Southern California has heat, beach culture, Hollywood, and street tacos. Northern California has coastal redwoods, fog, and rutting Roosevelt Elk bugling on the slopes of volcanos. Central California is more difficult to define.

Beginning in the east, the White Mountains run along the Nevada border, home to the Bristlecone pine, the oldest living thing on earth. Moving west you come to the Owens Valley leaping up into the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, crowned by the tallest peak in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney at 14, 505 feet. Called by John Muir “the Range of Light,” the Sierra Nevada Mountains boast both Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. That fact alone establishes Central California’s dominance among the three Californias.

            Descending through the foothills of the western Sierras you come upon the Central Valley, an agricultural wonderland that feeds not only the United States, but much of the world. Sure the 1848 Gold Rush, also a central California phenomenon, was impressive, but the real gold comes in the form of peaches, almonds, raisins, and basically everything you could possibly put in a salad, and then some.

            Traveling further west across the coastal ranges you come to Big Sur where the forested crags of the Santa Lucia Mountains tower over the Pacific and cold, clear, mountain streams plunge off of cliffs into azure bays brimming with sea life.

            Once the road was built in the 1920s and 1930s settlers began trickling in, building patchwork homesteads in sheltered, forested valleys perched high above the sea.  Big Sur has always attracted artists, poets, hermits, and other refugees from Middle America looking for something more intrepid, more mystical, and more vibrant than the altogether respectable but underwhelming goal of having a sensible career and your own washer and dryer. At Big Sur, you hardly even need clothes. Let alone a tie.

            So what is it about California, central coastal California especially, that calls out to lost souls all over the world? Why do they come to Big Sur in droves just to drive this remote, dizzying highway and stare bedazzled at the jeweled Pacific curving toward infinity? Some places take on a mythical stature, a sacred sense of place far surpassing any fortunate confluence of geological features or natural beauty. Sure, Big Sur has all of that. But it has more, that quality the French call je ne sais quoi, or I know not what. You can’t put your finger on it, but Big Sur has it: a palpable spirit, an aliveness, a soul, a something you just can’t define.

            When places take on a mythical quality, they become a living, breathing, conscious being. Science, of course, laughs at talk like that. In the western scientific paradigm nature is not a spiritual presence, it is a collection of objects; observable, quantifiable, and explainable with a series of linear analytical propositions. The Salinan and Esselen peoples who originally inhabited this region for 10,000 years before the Conquest didn’t quite see it that way.

            For Native peoples, an alternative epistemology holds sway. They see the realm of nature not as a field of disconnected objects, but as an interconnected web – pull one thread, and you touch it all. From this perspective, it doesn’t make sense to talk about plants in the abstract, but only about this plant, in this soil, in this valley, in this weather, on this day, near this stream, in this season, in relationship with these birds, rodents, snakes, and insects…and now us as we observe it, for we too are an inseparable part of the whole. As John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” There is no meaningful and ultimate distinction between the observer and observed. In deep seeing, we become both invisible and indivisible. There is only one. We, in the end, are the universe observing itself.

            That’s what makes a sacred place sacred: the hidden interconnectedness shines through the surface and reveals itself. Once we see it, or rather, feel it, we carry this expanded awareness everywhere we go, returning home with new eyes. And then we realize the real truth, the truth that was staring us in the face the whole time, only we did not see it. Every place is a sacred place.

            If any place is sacred, every place is sacred.

            When we spring to life somewhere, we spring to life everywhere.

            This is the value and vital importance of travel, especially pilgrimages to extraordinary places like Big Sur. Standing on a bluff, the sun on your back, held fast by the curving arms of a cedar, you experience an interchange: through every pore of your skin you feel your spirit and the earth’s spirit pouring into one another, the way a freshwater stream and the Pacific Ocean pour into one another in the estuary of a Big Sur beach. No more struggle, no more strain, because you are part of something bigger than yourself and you always have been. You don’t do anything alone. How could you? That was an illusion. One of the many, many illusions stripped away by the willingness to realize your authentic nature.