Holidays and Rituals

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

We may not even think about why we are doing what we are doing, but the accompanying feelings compel us. We have looked forward to it for weeks. This was supposed to be a time of rest, but we make ourselves as busy as ever—even more so, but with few complaints other than the hassle of the inevitable competition in dodging others around us doing the same. Not everyone is equally enthused, but everyone takes part in some way.

We dress in clothes reserved or newly purchased for the occasion. We make appointments with friends and family, and if we are lucky, we even have to send regrets or prepare for serious juggling due to an overabundance of invitations. We buy appropriate foods, some available only this time of year, and we plan long days in our kitchens, looking forward to the culinary projects, perhaps following newly discovered recipes, but more often revisiting long-held family traditions.

Some people are not so lucky. They might feel the social void in their lives even more in these periods. It might bring focus to past losses, times that felt happier, especially linked to such occasions. Others might huddle alone at the fringes of their social world, lacking a family, sufficient wealth or even home. But they too might absorb some of the additionally warmed air and light generated to overcome the cold and darkness. They might also be more readily recognized as a person in the generosity of the season. More likely to receive a helping hand or a greeting, when otherwise they are invisible.

As I write this I am surrounded by cut and decorated trees that at any other time of year would be incongruous in this indoor space, lit in a carefree wealth of colors, decorated with dangling bulbs that reflect the light further, and by strings of false gold and silver that complete the opulence. The mall is busy with shoppers, the café buzzing with those taking a break from shopping or meeting with friends in this convenient social place, the market. The Polish skies are a thick grey, making it difficult to say what time of day it is, only that it is a new day straining to show itself for a few hours. It is the day after Christmas in fact, but the festive atmosphere continues.

Christmas in Amman, Jordan   Photo by Patrick Parrish

Christmas music continues in the background, the same songs heard for nearly a week in a near constant loop, only now slowly being replaced by non-holiday music. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” I am told repeatedly, convincingly by a mellifluous voice. And in many ways it is. Somehow, even in the deep cold of winter, with daylight occupying only a third of each 24 hours, very little green in the landscape, and a nearly constant light precipitation that alternates between rain and snow, it does feel like the most wonderful time of the year. This message is repeated in not just the music, but in the tones of voices people use, in the bright and colorful lights, and in the abundant family feasts each day. There is little time for a lack of wonder in this relentless flow.

Some holidays are ”natural,” emerging from the rhythmic flow of life. In this case, it is the darkness and natural retreat of the northern hemisphere winter. Others are “artificial,” designated to celebrate historic events, like national independence or other historic social events. Secular holidays like these are welcome, but not as natural or compelling. They are just dates on the calendar--excuses for a long weekend. The ones with deep roots, the “holy days,” motivated by timeless myths and natural events, seem to emerge inevitably from their times of year.

Holidays are rituals that for most of us have nearly lost their original meanings. Or perhaps these meanings are superfluous anyway, accumulated through the years to further the rituals that predate their surface meanings. There may be evolutionary motives underlying some holidays.

The study of human rituals, like those associated with holiday celebrations, emerged surprisingly from the study of animal behaviors (Stephenson, 2015). When 19th century ethologists recognized animal behaviours that reminded them of stylized rituals—postures or “dances” conducted for communication or community-definition rather than instrumental ends, the connection to human behavior was unavoidable. Ritual was the only concept that seemed to fit to certain complex courtship behaviours or displays of power. Since this time, the definition of “ethology” has expanded to include the biological study of human behaviour, and sociologists, anthropologists and related scholars have further studied with new perspective the numerous formalized patterns of behavior used throughout human communities and passed down through generations. These behaviours, many of which are likely biologically as well as culturally based, have also been offered as one possible origin of the arts. It is assumed that rituals, being simpler and requiring fewer resources, preceded the making of the artefacts that we currently think of as Art (Dissanayake, 1995).

Art making and appreciation as a form of ritual is an appropriate attribution. The relation of ritual to the arts and aesthetic experiences are their assertiveness, their formality, and the value-added meaning provided. Rituals are a way of engaging in the world partially on its terms (the situation calling for celebration) and partially on our own terms (our choices of ritual acts, either individually or communally chosen). They involve anticipation, preparation, and attention at many levels, not just visual appreciation, but also physical and social action--agency, not passive reception. Most obviously, rituals have a pattern that plays out, with a beginning, middle and end, sometimes more directly enacting a sort of story, sometimes just following through on an expected and carefully executed sequence of actions whose meaning is secondary to the care of execution and need for culmination. In some cultures, rituals are included in the list of traditional arts, such as the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Most martial arts have rituals associated with them as well, ones intended to show respect and humility, and not displays of power. Many artists have their own personal rituals used to guide them in making art (Currey, 2013). Several forms of traditional sandpainting, most famously that of Tibetan monks, are more ritual than what we think of as works of Art, even though a product is at least temporarily produced. Tibetan sandpaintings, however, are destroyed upon completion, the ritual having achieved its purpose, an enactment that symbolizes impermanence. While the process of art making can be ritual, this does not make all ritual Art.

Holiday Rituals

That many holiday rituals are associated with changing seasons, or peak celestial events like the solstices and equinoxes, is not difficult to understand. Even in the tropics, where days do not change so much in length over the year, seasons are determined by the onset of relatively rainy and dry periods, which also drive rituals. These climatological periods or celestial events have a deep influence on human behaviour and emotion, and how the initiation of these times transpires can be considered omens of coming success or failure. Note that the Western versions of these holidays originated in the northern latitudes, so their parallels do not line up with those south of the equator.

Holidays, as their name implies, are often connected to religious practices, since the coming seasons themselves are beyond our ability to affect and in the hands of fate or gods. But the associated rituals are a way of attempting human influence. These rituals can be quite serious and far from passive entertainment, meeting one of Dewey’s (1934) criteria for art, and perhaps even meeting the criteria for “great art” (Hildebrand, 2015), given their timelessness and transferability across locations and cultures. Yet rituals, while definitely aesthetic, are not quite the same as Art, which involves agency and/or contingency, and not predictability. But this statement leaves a nagging doubt I will come back to later.

Winter Solstice (e.g., Saturnalia, Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Saint-Sylvestre, New Year’s Eve and Day)

Winter is difficult, as anyone living above or below of about 35 degrees North or South latitude knows fully well. In the depths of 21 December, when the sun is at its nadir of influence (in the north), despair is understandable. Cold temperatures and snow that force one indoors can lead to claustrophobic feelings, even “cabin fever.” Low levels of sunlight, exasperated by cloudy weather, is known to cause the mild depression known as “seasonally affective disorder.” But human rituals are perhaps at their strongest during these times in response. Many important holy days occur, times to remind ourselves of the gifts of deities (sometimes associated with their births or deaths) and promoting a hopefulness toward the future. In the darkest days, we gather to share communal feelings and good will, personal gifts to those closest to us and family feasts. We light up the dark skies with decorative baubles, and make more use of candles. We use more positive greetings, which can be as simple and generic as “Happy Holidays” or “Bonnes Fetes,” or more specific, depending on our degree of religious faith. Most notably, we spend money, accounting for the phrase “Black Friday” or the day after American Thanksgiving, as the day retailers become profitable for the year (or “in the black” ink in their accounting ledgers). We make the most of what we have, and some people even go into debt in over-generosity in expectation of a wealthy year to come. Winter holidays bring symbols of prosperity within what might otherwise feel like hopelessness.

New Year's Eve in Geneva, Switzerland   Photo by Patrick Parrish

Spring Equinox (e.g., Easter, Passover, Walpurgisnacht, May Day, April Fool’s Day)

In Spring hope is renewed. The greening of spring and the possibility inherent in the planting of new crops bring thoughts of rebirth. Spring is associated with fertility rituals, preparing for the prosperity in the growth seasons of Spring and Summer (although more birthdays actually occur in September). In Christian societies it is the time of Easter, and among Jewish, it is the time of Passover, celebrating the Exodus of the Children of Israel, and the forming of a new nation.

Spring is a time of processions and sanctity, even more than the Winter holidays, because it is the symbol of the proof of God’s status. It is also a time of fasting, perhaps linked to the extinguished stores of winter food, before the new crops are available. The Spring holidays extend into May, when Maypole rituals rather conspicuously celebrate fertility with the phallic symbol, a practice captured in one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous stories in his collection of Twice-Told Tales. The practice of coloring and sharing Easter eggs also likely originated as a fertility symbol, but also has gained Christian connotations.

Easter in Mallorca  Photo by Patrick Parrish

Ironically, Spring is also a time of fasting, because it is the time when last year's preserved food supplies may be running short. This is preceded, of course, by a final day of extravagant eating, the Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday (or some other day of the week, Thursday in many cultures). Feasting and fasting are two of the most common ways to affect our experience of the world, creating altered states of mind, but they also have ritual, biological, and practical bases.

Summer Solstice (Midsummer's Day)

Summer is a time of abundance--food, sun, drink, and the resultant energy. Midsummer festivals are rituals of music, dancing, and food--along with general abandon.

The Flaming Lips at Vida Festival  Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

They are also tributes to the beauty and abilities of the body, not only with sparse clothing worn at music festivals and on beaches, but through athletic events. (The early Olympic games combined the two, with nudity being common during much of its ancient period.)

While sports are carried out year round thanks to indoor venues, they flourish during the summer--amateur and professional alike. Sports can be a significant component of rituals, and an individual sport contains many specific rituals, from a coin flip, choice of attire, and the entry to the game. Penalties are imposed for violating ritual behavior. The Olympics are originally an event held near the summer solstice, and in fact a highly ritualized tribute to Zeus. Yet anthropologists generally do not consider sports to be rituals in themselves due to the randomness inherent in its play and outcomes.

Autumn Equinox (Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, All Saints' Day)

If Summer holidays are about exuberance, Autumn holidays make a strong contrast with their subdued and internal focused. They are more meditative. These are the most of holy of Jewish holidays, times of introspection and repentance. But this is also the time of the final harvest, and a time of reflection before the days of darkness and limited resources ahead. Harvest festivals, like Thanksgiving, offer thanks for all that has been made available during the year.

Autumn holidays are also reflective the coming darkness with their focus on death and honoring ancestors, as with All Saints Day. This time of year was considered by Celtic peoples to blur the boundaries between the living and the dead. Halloween is an outcome of this focus, with its celebration of spirits and other dark side manifestations, intended to ward off the most evil spirits, but welcome those that might help predict the future given their knowledge of the other side. Halloween, which began as the Celtic Samhain, is marked by bonfires as offerings to the spirits, and by decorations and costumes that recall the dead.

Art and Ritual

I have warned against leaping to the conclusion that rituals are a form of Art, even though this is a tempting idea, especially given the grandeur of Easter processions, color of Buddhist monasteries and eloquence of Japanese Tea Ceremonies. Several times in this blog, I have also suggested that questions that try to define what is and is not Art are relatively useless, because one can almost always find counterexamples. If we ask instead, “What experiences have the potential to be aesthetic?,” the answers are less difficult to challenge, and in this case, ritual fits well the criteria offered.

Buddhist Temple   Photo by Maja Kuna

Rituals are no doubt opportunities to express intent, be present, and offer openness and trust. They are also situations with immediate, compelling, resonant, and coherent qualities. However, a question comes when we consider the situational requirement of malleability, the ability to assert agency and make a situation our own. This aspect of ritual has been questioned by those who argue that ritual requires a commitment to give up authorship of your own actions (Stephenson, 2015). Rituals are a form of template or guide to action that allow for little personal modification if they are true to the spirit of ritual. This conclusion would be damning to any consideration of ritual as art.

But as Stephenson (2015) goes on to show, others argue that simple actions, even repetitive, scripted actions, even spoken or chanted words, can have “the potential and power to impact one’s intentions, emotions, feelings, and beliefs.” Ritual has a performance aspect not unlike theatre and dance, and does leave room for interpretation, at least internally, and certainly leaves room for developing new attitudes or states of mind over time. In fact, it is not working if one is just “going through the motions.” This is one of the primary reasons for conducting rituals, to shape our lives and ourselves.

Holiday celebrations are special forms of rituals in that they are widely and simultaneously practiced. They arise from the pervasive ambiance created by a broader community, by seasonal characteristics, and by our biological nature responding to these.

References

Dewey, John (1934/1989) Art as Experience. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, Volume 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dissanayake, Ellen (1995) Homo aestheticus. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Hildebrand, David (2015) Art is not entertainment: John Dewey’s Pragmatist defense of an aesthetic distinction, Southwest Philosophy Review, (31/1), January 2015, pp. 225 - 234, DOI: 10.5840/swphilreview201531123.

Stephenson, Barry (2015) Ritual: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Projects

What Makes a Project?

There are few things more rewarding than carrying out a project--the initial decision to tackle it, the planning, gathering of resources, problem solving at the tricky points, and accomplishing tasks step-by-step toward conclusion. We often construct our everyday activities in the form of projects due to this appeal.

I am not speaking here about the formal projects we are responsible for at work, although all projects share common attributes, but the informal, daily projects we define for ourselves. Almost anything can be a project, but not everything reaches this status. Daily errands, while they have a defined sequence, require steps and decisions, and can provide rewards in their accomplishment, lack several important qualities. Creating a to-do list and checking off its items might be a common way of generating rewards, to gamifying everyday life by putting a frame around our efforts and scoring them, but unless connected to a coherent project, a list of to-do’s on its own is unlikely to offer the same level of reward. A simple to-do list also lacks a compelling vision of valued outcomes, resulting in a lower level of engagement in the tasks themselves. While we might even obsessively drive ourselves to check off all the items, it is more the collection of check-offs than the tasks that drive us.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Accordingly, I suggest that vision, engagement, and coherence are qualities that help to define a project. But projects can be of many scales. Some projects might take just one or a few days--cleaning out the garage, sorting and arranging your photos, rearranging a room of your home, or earning a scuba diving certificate. Some are slightly longer--like planning a long trip or moving to a new home, reading a very long book or series of books, doing substantial research on a topic. Some can take years--renovating or building a house, learning a language, writing a book, training to complete a marathon, or adopting a diet and exercise routine that makes a lasting difference. Many longer-term efforts differ from projects. They might be something greater--a life path, a career progression, accomplishing a significant goal or personal dream. I suspect that few people call the process of obtaining their PhD or reaching an executive position a “project.” These might have qualities similar to those described above, from an initial intention and incremental, but sure, steps toward accomplishment. There might be many projects embedded within the effort, such as the dissertation or, in the case of the executive, more formal corporate projects in which to demonstrate skills in along the way. These longer term efforts might also provide a potentially powerful aesthetic reward in the finality. But the steps to completion are more complex, not all anticipated, and require significant interaction and input from others. You might be the driver, but the road is not fully visible and not fully owned by you. However rewarding the path might be, the map is never as certain as it can be in a project.

So, this suggests another boundary to what is considered a project. The degree to which we can anticipate the required steps, and not the length of time, is key. Too many contingencies diffuse an activity and prevent it from being a project. However, too few contingencies reduce the rewards by making the activity rote, also preventing it from reaching project status. So, having a the right degree of contingency is another boundary. A project requires a feeling of agency, or being personally responsible for its outcomes.

Perhaps the most critical factor, related to moderate contingency and agency, is ownership. It has become popular to speak of something as “My/Our ______ Project” as a way to set it off from other more mundane activities. Especially when not related to a job, it denotes a special, personal effort with high expectations. A project can be an important means to identity, a way of crafting oneself as unique. Everyday routines and rituals might define us over time, but a project is granted special significance. Like a story, a project has a beginning, middle, and end, a discrete period that stands out from the ongoing flow of experience. And most importantly, we are the protagonists of that story. In an important way, we are our projects.

My Landscaping Project

Some years ago, I purchased an old Victorian house that had been mostly renovated other than its back yard, which was an ignored, barren wasteland. There was nothing welcoming about it--half dead grass, a chain-link fence that barely pretended privacy or security, and almost no interesting plants other than an old apple tree in need of pruning. The lot was of moderate size, but the footprint of the house and garage left few expanses, dividing the yard into pieces--left of house, right of house, area between garage and house, and the bit more extended space to the back edge of the property, much of which had been used as a parking lot. It was something to dig my teeth into.

Jay@MorphoLA, CC BY 2.0

Even in the first year, with so many other issues to attend to in the house, not to mention a new job, the yard, or garden as it would evolve, became a project. First, the project consisted of producing scaled drawings on paper, imagining gardens of various sorts. I began reading guides on landscaping, and I had already visited many gardens. But now, with this project in mind, my awareness of garden designs was awakened as I walked through my neighborhood and the city parks. I could envision this garden taking on multiple characters, using the divisions the house created almost like rooms, to allow the space to become bigger through variety. There would be a rock garden here, something more oriental there, the hint of an arbor anchored by the apple tree on the left side, a trellis creating a secluded patio in the center, and place for vegetables and herbs in the back. The early drawings continued to be useful through many years of incremental progress.

I divided the large project into subprojects, for the most part, one “room” at a time. However, considering the entire project as a whole required some initial steps that transcended the individual rooms, such as a wooden privacy fence, as well as a flagstone patio and walkways. Each of these individual projects first required researching various methods of construction, building codes, and choices and sources of materials. It was a slow process, but I was not in a hurry. These things were accomplished one year at a time--purchasing fencing, digging post holes, and constructing many meters of fencing, including two small wooden arbors took one year. The next year was occupied by purchasing flagstone, digging pathways and a patio base, lining them with steel edging, then filling these with cloth and two layers of different sizes of gravel to block weeds, and finally the assembling the flagstones like a giant jigsaw puzzle to form an attractive pattern to the patio and walkways, the gaps filled with fine sand.

Of course, there were many planting decisions along the way and following these initial steps, including a new tree. Then the building of a few raised flower beds also with stone. Incrementally, the scale drawings became reality, with minor deviations of course due to learning what was possible and fitting to budget and time. I never completed this project fully before moving from the home, perhaps only to about an 80 percent level. But this has never been a source of frustration. The joy I found in undertaking the many side projects was sufficient, and I knew that new projects waited for me. I learned in this process that projects have intrinsic values: learning, physical activity, problem solving, composition (in this case visual and tactile)--not unlike playing a complicated game or sport, and of course, not unlike art. Recalling this project reminds me how much of my life has been filled with one project after another, weaving them with great effort, spinning them out endlessly like the fates spin the days, asserting myself and growing through them. Many times these were in the end projects for projects’ sake--without any direct outcome I benefit from still. But they were done for my sake too, because I was these projects.

Process of a Project

Projects can vary not just in how they meet the boundary conditions, but more obviously in their materials and products. But there are commonalities in their processes. Parrish (2017) offers a very general process for design projects that can be a useful framework for all projects. While designing is a special form of project, it is a broad category, and so this process may offer commonalities shared by all types of projects. In a way, projects are life-by-design--ways of intentionally shaping our lives--so design provides a good starting point.

In general terms, a project includes the following, more or less in this order:

Yearning for change: A project is driven by a need or goal, arising from yearning or desire to make a change, learn something new, to improve oneself, to enjoy, or to have a new experience. The range of motivation for projects is wide. And as noted above, the motivation may emerge simply from the need to assert agency, accomplish something with the time given to us, engage our bodies and minds with the world, and enjoy the inherent rewards.

Gathering resources: Many things are gathered to begin a project and move it forward--information on materials and procedures; explanations of how things work; examples, models and templates to guide the effort; materials and tools, whose purchase instill investment in the effort as well as bring capability. This phase may go on throughout a project.

Envisioning outcomes: Projects involve both our creative and rational faculties to envision an outcome, and this dual application of mental faculties is part of the reward. Any outcome, be it a personal change like body improvement or new skills, a change to our environment like a renovated home, an elaborate dinner personally prepared, or a new experience, like traveling to a new place, is at first envisioned. We may imagine a cloudy possibility or at times a very clear picture of the end result, and this image helps us decide how to undertake the project. We may alternatively rationally deliberate on the end result, which is also a creative application in the strictest sense, but using more logical rules and procedures, perhaps based more on evidence (examples and templates) than personal creativity. However, people tend to overestimate how much of their planning results from rational deliberation as compared to creative imagination and external suggestion, rationally justified after retrospection.

Depicting outcomes: Often, as in My Landscaping Project, a project begins with drawings or written descriptions of a goal. In this activity, which might occur at any or many phases of the project, the emphasis is on making representations or descriptions to help the final outcome more tangible, aiding in planning and development. This is not always necessary, but can be highly useful. Depiction can be a creative process in itself, helping to make a cloudy vision become more clear, and revealing gaps and misconceptions, or opportunities not at first seen.

Transforming: A project is first and foremost a process of transformation. This is what defines its beginning, middle, and end. The transformation can be visible, as in landscaping, body improvement, or writing a book; or internal and invisible, as in learning a new skill or developing new habits. During a project, the project materials (often including ourselves) are transformed by us into the envisioned outcome, or something approximating that outcome, through negotiation between our capabilities and efforts on one side, and what the world offers or withholds on the other. For example, materials have only limited ways they can accommodate our intentions (stone and wood have their own levels of malleability and tools can be used in limited ways), and our plans might have to adjust as we learn those limitations.

Learning: A pervasive part of any project is learning. Through projects, we gain holistic knowledge in the form of practiced skills, deep understanding of how the world works in the context of the project, and both domain-specific and general knowledge. The world learns with us through our efforts to transform it, taking on new characteristics and affordances. What we learn can be taken forward into new projects or everyday interactions. Through projects, we also learn about the world by seeing how it resists, accommodates, or aids our efforts. Without projects, we remain a bit more ignorant.

One of the points of offering this general project process is to demonstrate the wider implication of projects within our lives. Looking over the process reveals close alignment with the process of inquiry offered by Dewey (1938/2008), which provides a Pragmatist stance on life experience. It also suggests that projects can become an aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1934/1989), which is the compelling source of joy that keeps us working on new projects throughout our lives.

Crafting our Lives through Projects

Richard Sennett (2008) writes about the work of craftspersons, those experts in developing practical artifacts whose importance has risen and fallen in status through history. At one time, craftspersons had their own Greek god in the form of Hephaestus, who taught mankind skills for shaping their worlds, making them more god-like. Projects are our ways of crafting better lives using the materials presented to us, and crafts are a key category of project. Projects represent a fundamental way of engaging with the world, resolving its challenges, and asserting our places within it. Projects, craftworks or otherwise, demand all our capacities, creative and logical, physical and willful, to make a personal stamp in the world. In this way, projects hold a special place, offering a holistic form of engagement that combines head and hand to stand above our more mundane routines.

We can get lost in a project. Demanding all our resources, they can create a situation that feels like an entire world of its own. Finding just the right material, determining the right way to make things fit together, creating a new, more appealing, version of something, pushing ourselves to make efforts when our bodies just want to relax, willfully abstaining or partaking when habit tells us to do otherwise until new habits take over--these are demanding, all-involving tasks.

Projects sometimes make us strive for perfection. To push far beyond the good-enough to the excellent and beautiful. Projects can compel us to give all our efforts to an activity in order to achieve a vision, or something even beyond that vision that begins to seem possible along the way. Perfectionism can make of a project work for its own sake, more than what is necessary to fill a need, because the work carries intrinsic rewards. Sennet (2008) warns of the dangers of this mindset, which can generate negative repercussions if in its inward focus it overlooks impacts that do damage to our environment and our lives. He cites the work of Oppenheimer in designing the atomic bomb as an extreme example.

This is the risk. We may become too demanding. We may lose vision of how our project could do damage to others or cause us to ignore other obligations. This risk requires mindfulness, but not avoidance. Projects are too important to us.

References

Parrish, P. (2017) Design as Design, in Carr-Chellman and Rowland (Eds), Issues in technology, learning, and instructional design: Classic and contemporary dialogues (pp. 7-11). New York: Routledge.

Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Body Integrity

We are never more connected to the world than when our bodies are at the center of the experience. Just a good morning stretch, stooping to water the garden plants, or a more dramatic jump into a cool lake to open the senses, these awaken the mind to our surroundings as much as to our flesh and bone. The feats of a ballet dancer or gymnast, the athleticism of a rock drummer or baseball shortstop, the balance of a yoga practitioner or surfer, the dexterity of a seamstress or painter, the precision of a renaissance sculptor, an archer or a golfer--these are all examples of life being lived close to its aesthetic and earthly roots. A slow, struggling walk into the park for a person with low-mobility takes them into an intimate relationship with the world whose difference with the previous examples is only quantitative. 

Photo by Larry Johnson, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

One of my most memorable yoga lessons was a thirty-minute practice on standing. Simply standing upright. I had not imagined before the number of considerations one could have about positioning the body in the act of standing well. There is the placement of the feet, set at shoulder width provides the best balance, and adjusted so that the body’s weight is evenly born from heel to toes. Then the leg muscles, from the calves to the thighs, with straightened knees, knowing that they are equally stressed and equally relaxed, reaching downward, connected through the feet to the earth. The hips, left and right balanced, not one or the other drifting down or outward. Attention to the critically important spine might have taken half the time alone to explore fully--how it can position the torso above the hips for a relaxed stance, releasing tension through an erect and not slouched arrangement, allowing the arms to hang freely and, like a tightrope walker’s pole, keeping one centered in space. At the top of the spine, the neck is a precarious extension, requiring special attention to relax yet ensure its direct alignment with the feet down below. And then the gaze, directed forward, into the world, full of visual and bodily awareness.

This sort of attention is possible only with practice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come naturally. It is an art that requires significant effort, and I confess that due to inconsistent practice I have never been completely satisfied with my level of success. But the trying is half the reward—discovering new relationships between body and mind and world, which, in the end, are maybe not as separate as we might think and act.

Photo by Matt Madd, Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In modern times, which arguably already began as the medieval world entered the Renaissance and then blossomed in the 18th century enlightenment with a predominant dualism, or mind-body separation, the body became increasingly marginalized, and this has deeply affected how we speak of, and therefore conceive of, ourselves. There is an even longer history of denouncing the body as impure and imperfect compared to the mind. Since classical Western philosophy, the body has been accused of being a distorting lens through which we are forced to view the true world with a chronic astigmatism, forever distanced from truth unless we subject ourselves to reason. Even many contemporary arguments about the importance of caring for the body are about its benefits for a well-functioning mind, not for the the body itself. When the body is considered “the temple of the soul,” as it is in Corinthians 6:19, it is being seen as a separate object, a temporary and corruptible container for a thing, the holy spirit, which does not belong to us, but to God.

Even those who see the mind as emerging from the body are prone to give it a special seat--the brain. Today, when we talk about the origin of emotions, decision making and learning, in commercial arenas like marketing as well as in psychology and teaching, we often focus on how the “brain” works, as if we would do well to vivisect these organs to analyze and manipulate their parts to achieve our goals. Scientists use electrodes and chemistry to affect or simulate feelings that would emerge more holistically from engagement with the world. But while chocolate is now known to stimulate the production of endorphins and create a mental state that might feel like love, it is not the same experience as being in love. The recent progress in the neurosciences to understand brain function and how it maps our bodies only fuels this marginalization of the rest of the body, the broader mind, and experience, which is only narrowly impersonated by the organ that resides in our head.

This continued separation of mind and body is belied by our renewed attention to health and physical well being. Art and aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, have been particularly guilty of diverting attention away from our bodies. The irony of this is not lost on Shusterman (2000), who points out that while human bodies are a perennial subject matter of the visual arts, particularly nude bodies, we ignore the body as a source of aesthetic experience. While the body is central to art--its beauty and sensuality as sources of desire, or its limitations and fragility as sources of suffering--it is only rarely considered an aesthetic medium. Dance is an obvious exception, but most people experience dance as participatory entertainment, and not fine Art, closer to sport maybe. In fact, Art and sport are seen as in competition for our attention, as well as for funding.

Shusterman sees this new attention to the body as a reaction to the explosion of immersive technological media that threaten to leave us overstimulated, yet resting lazily on the couches of the world, wherever we find them--in train cars, park benches, office chairs, or our living rooms--where we can more readily focus on information screens. Despite the temptation to sit still and absorb what media have to offer, many instead feel the need to move, to enjoy the cascading benefits of a body in action.

It was good to see the physicality of the virtual world envisioned in the recent film, Ready Player One, where Oasis players run on multi-directional treadmills and thrust their arms wearing haptic gloves or full body suits in the real world, while their avatars run, swoop, glide, and fight in the virtual one. There is no denying that technology is continuing to combine with our bodies to change our experience. It always has been this way. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, all media are extensions of us. But this is not in conflict with the point of this article. No one is born with skis or a bicycle beneath them, yet these become key to certain experiences.

Photo by Samuel Yoo, Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Despite living and working in a technology-dominated world, people now more readily take to bicycles for their commutes or evening exercise, and walking/running/hiking paths are often filled, as are gyms and yoga studios. In China, crowds of people gather outdoors in parks for their daily group exercise or dance activities, and the martial arts, both traditional and especially the newer mixed formats, continue to grow. People, in general, are paying closer attention to the health of their bodies and the resulting benefits to their lives. Abundant research shows that exercise has a positive effect on brain structure, on memory and other cognitive capabilities, and on mood and emotional well being. And the benefits of exercise are not just physical and mental, but metaphysical as well. Exercise contributes to an ability to engage with the world in deeper, more satisfying ways, as well as to affect more change as physical capabilities are improved. It helps us to get more things done. Exercise provides rewards in the form of improved appearance too, and this can be an initial driver. But here we are focused on exercise as a way to improve experience, even though appearance influences experience as well in our society.

People often speak of staying connected or re-connecting to their bodies (dualism raising its head) if they lead lives that keep them sedentary and constrained for long periods, cooped up in offices and meeting rooms, or in planes, behind counters, in store rooms and restaurants. Even those who get a lot of physical activity in their work may feel constrained due to its limited and repetitive nature. Perhaps those working jobs that include heavy manual labor, such as construction and farming, do not feel as large a drive to fulfill a missing aspect of their lives. Alternatively, they might be even more aware of the rewards of an active life. In my experience, those who exercise a lot on the job still seek outside exercise, maybe to balance their work-time exercise with other forms. Suffering workaday constraints, people seek outlets in hundreds of potential varieties. Some are considered extreme, like body building or marathon running, but many are appreciated by almost anyone, such as biking, jogging, or their health club surrogates. Sports like tennis, volleyball and football add a social dimension. While all these have an “inner game”, a recognition that mindset and mental focus affects performance, what is interesting is that many practices, particularly those that come from oriental cultures, have an explicitly mental or spiritual component along with a physical one. Yoga and Tai Chi are prominent examples in which meditation plays a key role.

Even more interesting for this discussion are practices that are primarily mental, yet grant physical rewards at the same time--the mirror of those listed above. Transcendental meditation (TM) is a good example. In TM, one calms an overactive mind by mentally repeating a multi-syllable mantra to take the place of ever-present thoughts about work and chores—leading to a relaxed state similar to the boundary between wakefulness and sleeping, a dreamy or, even better, empty, but semi-conscious state, resulting in deep physical and mental recuperation. Research shows (Rosenthal, 2016) that TM effects both alpha wave production in the brain and general EEG coherence, but also the secretion of prolactin and altered galvanic skin response in the broader body. All these work together to increase calmness and attention, leading to potentially increased effectiveness in many aspects of life.

Photo by wham! bam!, Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Body integrity means more than a well functioning body. It means having a mind well connected to the world through one’s body. Thinking and speaking of mind-body separation is merely a way to rationalize what seem like shortcomings of the body and the appearance of having a consciousness that can be separate from the world—one that dreams and comes up with new ideas, for example. There is a tradition, however, that has developed throughout 20th century philosophy and cognitive science of the embodied mind—one that places the mind and cognition as spread throughout the body and out into the world as well.

We have always used physical metaphors to describe both logical and emotion states—e.g. idioms like under control, falling behind, beside ourselves, warm relations, burning love—showing our reliance on the body in forming and understanding complex concepts. (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) Emotions have been shown to have both physiological effects and origins (Damasio, 1999). We currently speak of learning organizations, distributed cognition, and activity systems to describe how worlds of people work and learn together. We speak of situated cognition to describe how people think in ways uniquely suited to their environment. Phenomenological philosophers, who study the nature of consciousness and experience, suggest that we should give up thinking about what an isolated, undomesticated mind might be like, insisting instead that we are born already in the world—in a family or even a village of people, with our bodies, and with our human minds and senses. We can never know what it is like not to be us, in the places we find ourselves.

Yet we constantly forget what it is like to be us, whether due to technology immersion, job constraints, or personal choices that ignore our nature. Through their work, artists help us to remember, to reposition us inside our bodies and inside our worlds, sometimes by asking us to step to one side to view it anew, and other times by rubbing our faces in it. We can also have integrity and do this work ourselves.

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Damasio, A. (1999) The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York.

Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic Books: New York.

Rosenthal, N. (2016) Supermind: How to boost performance and live a richer and happier life through transcendental meditation. Tarcher Perigree: New York.

Shusterman, R. (2000) Performing live: Aesthetic alternatives for the ends of art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Homemaking

I have a small Persian carpet lying next to my bed that I purchased on a trip to Iran a few years ago. I bought it in one of the dozens of carpet shops lining the main path through a central, covered marketplace--a village-sized center where my Iranian colleague had recommended we could get a good deal. With my colleague’s help, the shopkeeper displayed carpet after carpet lifted from piles that rose up to our shoulders, for more than 20 minutes, until I was convinced of my choices. The carpets available ranged from those costing thousands, large enough to fill a room and sufficiently detailed, colorful, and imaginatively designed to overwhelm the senses. I was traveling with carry-on luggage for my three-day visit, and wanted only a small addition for my very small apartment.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

What I purchased probably surprised everyone. While one carpet I chose showed a traditional geometric pattern, deep blue with golden paisley teardrops, what I considered my true find of the day was a less-traditional, almost primitive-looking small red carpet no larger than a welcome mat, lacking fully straight edges (which to me helps to show its handmade origins), covered with rough depictions of regional animals--birds, a wild cat, deer, a camel, and some difficult to discern--irregularly distributed among vegetation rather than arranged symmetrically. I loved many other options, but I knew somehow that I would come to prize this curious piece. I later learned that this design had a tradition dating back to the 18th century, originating in the practice of reproducing pictorial elements found in ancient ruins.

I step barefooted onto this carpet each morning after waking, and its comfort and warmth is welcome each night as well. It also softens the creaking of the old wooden floors. I don’t always look at it directly, but it is a lot more than something soft to step on. It has become part of my home, and will travel with me to my next home. Somehow, this foreign object is now a part of me.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

This is how it goes: We move through life slowly filling our homes with the things we need and that catch our eye, not unlike birds building a nest, incorporating those that feel potentially meaningful. Some are beautiful from the outset, bursting with meaning. Then others (but certainly not all) grow even more meaningful as we encounter them repeatedly. Some we might consider to be pieces of Art, but others just pieces of life. They attach themselves to us in significant ways--slowly insinuating themselves until we begin to identify with them and would miss them badly if we lost them.They have become part of our autobiographical narrative, which we would now, without them, only stagger forward. A favorite teapot or cooking pan can feel like an old friend, reflecting memories of the thoughts and sensations arising from those pots of tea and satisfying meals, the ways we worked with them to produce a perfect brew or pasta sauce. The sight of the pan might recall the sight, sound, and smell of the olive oil sizzling at the edges of the garlic, capturing its flavor before we add the tomatoes and basil. A comfortable chair might seem to have absorbed the dreams from the naps we had sitting there, or images from the movies we watched or books we read. Hundreds of latent images can be sent floating just barely superliminal each time we sit, adding comfort to the air. Many objects will have a story behind them, like the origins of my carpet, but also stories that have grown around how they have claimed a permanent position in our home or traveled with us over time from place to place. Some will accrete meaning primarily through use, even though their stories are humble. And then some might alternatively lose significance, grow boring or even annoying. We might come to resent them, fight with them. Some wear out and have to be replaced, so we disown them. We let them go, and the process begins again with new objects. Our relationships to objects, especially those we bring into our homes, can be complex, even melodramatic (Easthope, 2004). Saito (2007) argues that people create and value a unique aesthetics of ambience, atmosphere, or mood surrounding the experience of everyday (not just exceptional) life.

Homemaking is a lot more than than adopting objects, of course. It is also the process of caring for these things and the spaces we and they occupy, cleaning and preserving, dusting and painting, and making an arrangement that is partly for efficiency, but more importantly, for beauty. This beauty might be only of the “Third Realm” (Danto, 2003, after Hegel)--third place after the “higher” forms of natural and artistic beauty because it is considered merely the adornment of something without inherent beauty, but this ranking is questionable. The homes we make, when we have the chance to do it right, accommodate our lives like a welcoming hand. We ache to leave our jobs at the end of the day to return to the comfort of home. Even after the most exotic and rewarding travels we ache for home. We can relax there, finally, because we have made it our own--it caters to us because we have catered to it. The Talking Heads sang about the modern delight to “pick the building that I want to live in” (Byrne, 1977), a home that can make it “easy to get things done,” to do important, personal things in these personal spaces because they offer convenience, including the chance to “relax with my loved ones.“ The tone is ironic, but the sentiment is not. Within our capabilities, we make our lives beautiful and convenient (not contrary concepts) by adapting our homes to us, by making them an extension of us. This is much more than decorative.

For couples and families, it might be the relationships between companions that make a home, more than the building and objects it contains. Even a small space and a few comforting objects might be enough to constitute a home for a couple, and perhaps it’s better that way--less baggage to weigh down the relationship, to drag focus from what is important. A studio or dilapidated apartment can feel secure and substantial in the right company--even an automobile or well-stocked van can offer the critical elements. This does not mean objects are not important, just that they are more flexible and acquire meaning more easily with additional people involved in the attribution. Henry David Thoreau advocated a simple lifestyle and home to allow room for a developing a relationship with the nature within and without us, and ascetics like Mahatma Ghandi did the same, even more convincingly, to support a spiritual relationship. The 1960’s hippie movement was built on such principles of simplicity as freedom, but the seventies saw a resurgence of the importance of home as a personal castle. (The Talking Heads emerged in the late 70’s.)

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Again, homemaking is a process, at times an aesthetic project, even more than the accumulation of things. The reward of homemaking comes from the making more than the having. Starting with a foreign space, perhaps an empty space, and claiming it through additions and perfections, slowly building a personal refuge that reflects one’s needs for comfort and beauty--this brings a resounding reward. The massive size of do-it-yourself emporiums, and even the size of the market I visited in Iran, are testament to the importance of homemaking. Even with less means or other priorities, homeowners and renters everywhere put in similar effort to produce an attractive home. In fact, little change has occurred during the last century in the average amount of time we spend caring for our homes, including food preparation and kitchen duties, which seems to be about 18-20 hours for single people, and probably double that for families. Level of affluence seems to make that number higher, not smaller, perhaps due to increased space and number of things owned, but also perhaps to the increased value placed on this aesthetic activity. Much of this homemaking improves the healthiness of a home, but health alone does not explain the scope of motivation, certainly not with modern conveniences.The introduction of advanced technologies that bring efficiencies to homemaking has not changed the amount of time devoted. This reinforces the notion that putting things in order and creating a state of cleanliness, as well as adding a personal stamp on our spaces, are some of the primary sources of meaning in our lives. Order brings a feeling of both beauty and security, however tenuous. The importance of this source of meaning is evident in those who have lost their homes, such as those experiencing natural disasters or in zones of human conflict.

The devastation of losing a home and the importance of building a new one are captured in Neumark’s (2013) study, Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced. This study looks at the trauma of displacement and the often simple, yet critical, incremental steps that refugees make to recover from a loss of home that breaks their on-going autobiographical narrative. She finds that recovery from traumas like the holocaust, other genocides, and displacement due to civil wars requires not assigning blame, retaliation, nor even accepting the trauma, which can lead to strong depression, but moving on and recovering a sense of beauty, a sense of control, often using a very few possessions taken in the haste of evacuation, and “reclaiming power over the experience of displacement” through “practical and symbolic beautification.” It involves making the new environment more familiar through physical adaptations that offer an expression of agency, taking the autobiographical narrative in a newly positive direction--re-attaching oneself to a world in which one is entitled to beauty.

Home may be one of the most primal and critical components of meaning in our lives. The refugee experience studied by Neumark magnifies its importance, but we each experience it everyday. From the time we wake up and step to the floor, feeling the carpet, wood, or tile beneath our feet, to the time we crawl into bed, the aesthetics of our home ambience is at play.

References

Byrne, David (1977), Don’t worry about the government, Talking Heads: 77.
Danto, Author (2003), The abuse of beauty, Peru, Illinois, Open Court.
Hazel Easthope (2010) A place called home, Housing, Theory and Society, 21:3, 128-138, DOI: 10.1080/14036090410021360
Neumark, Devora (2013), Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced, Housing, Theory and Society, 30:3, 237-261, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2013.789071
Saito, Yuriko (2007) Everyday Aesthetics, Oxford University Press.

Ten definitions of the Word "Meaning"

Throughout this blog, I have suggested that aesthetic experiences are “those that stand out as especially meaningful.” As if that cleared everything up.

But this is glossing over, shorthand for a wide range of experiences. What makes us call an experience meaningful? What is really happening when we feel this way? This short exploration attempts to answer these questions in at least ten ways. Ten is a lot of ways, and there is naturally some overlap. But I think a case can be made for the individual efficacy of each of these ten definitions, and probably many more. (Acknowledgements to philosopher George Santayana for this riff on his famous essay, “Some Meanings of the Word Is”).*

1. Meaning is definition: When we ask, What does that word mean?, we are asking what the word, as a symbol, signifies. We expect the response to be a synonym, or perhaps one or more phrases that clarify the definition in more detail. Experiences can have definitions as well, but more complex than a synonym can satisfy. A wedding is more than the dictionary definition of that word, its meaning might include a description of the typical rituals involved, the expectations implied and feelings associated with the experience, which also define it.
2. Meaning is importance: We call something meaningful when it is important to us, when it has or will have a large impact. A turning point in our lives is meaningful. An historic event is meaningful when it has repercussions. A statistic is meaningful when it provides clear evidence. Even a small object or event can be meaningful when it reminds us of something else significant to us—a family member, another part of our life.
3. Meaning indicates value: Similar to importance, value indicates importance, in this case in terms of our willingness to devote time or money--a more personal significance. We volunteer time for a cause because it is meaningful to us. We read about a topic, such as its history or deep explanatory texts, because it holds meaning. We spend time and money on family activities because we value those connections. Travel or sports might be meaningful for the rewards they bring, so we invest in the equipment and means to engage in them.
4. Meaning denotes relationship: The relationship of one thing to others is a part of its definition. This is particularly true for people, who define themselves by their relationships to family, profession, class, nationality, race, and of course, favorite football teams. Sometimes common tastes define a group, particularly musical tastes or favorite hobbies. Shared meaningful beliefs also create relationships. Things and events are meaningful when they help to define our relationship to society or the natural world.
5. Meaning emerges from order: We discern meaning when things are in order--well sorted, visible, and in their proper place. A text is meaningful not just by being accurate, but also by being well organized. A well-structured event is easier to engage in, we can find our way within it and know where it will take us. We know where and how to fit inside meaningful experiences and how to play a role.
6. Meaning is clarity: Order helps to provide clarity, but a clear explanation does even more to make something meaningful. When all the words work together to elucidate, when the image is discernible, when the music reaches an expected destination or engaging rhythm, these bring clarity. An experience has clarity when all the elements have a recognizable place, when the elements are expressive of a clear purpose.
7. Meaning is continuity: As much as some of us hate boredom, we hate discontinuity more. We are creatures of habit, we like to know what comes next. What a nightmare it would be to wake up in an unknown place with an unknown identity, with nothing to hang onto, needing to decide on a first step, not just a next one. We want recognizable buoy. Experiences are most meaningful when they build on our past and intended future.
8. Meaning is truth: Truth is another of those multifaceted words that demand a lot of care. Experiences are meaningful if they feel true. But if you expect objective truth, you want more than a feeling, you want the experience to be rationally solid, beyond argument, and based on evidence, with confidence that the meaning you derive will be derivable in all equal situations for all those who experience with equal rationality. Art does not have much place here. If you allow for pragmatic truth, or warranted assertions, meaning emerges when it suits your needs and purposes, and also that of others. Pragmatic truth can be agreed upon based on common experiences, whether or not it was rationally derived. It might simply “ring true,” and that might be good enough. For many, art is expected to possess at least pragmatic truth. Finally, you might be moved more by an inner, intuitive truth, non-rational, not-necessarily-pragmatic, but powerful to you and others who might be open to your expression of it. Some prefer art that is only intuitively true, open to many personal interpretations of meaning.
9. Meaning is intention: We all have intentions, goals, wishes, hopes, and beliefs—states of mind that color which experiences emerge as most meaningful. If an experience leads us toward or supports an intention, it engages us and makes it stand out as meaningful. If you want to climb your first 4000 meter mountain and finally do it, this milestone stands out above other major hikes (which are already aesthetic) because it satisfies your intention. If an experience confirms a belief about yourself or your world, it stands out. If an experience “sets things right,” confirms or justifies a situation—leads to an outcome that seems justified, we might call it meaningful.
10. Meaning is identity: Identity is another way of saying “definition”, so we have come full circle. But here the word indicates perhaps the most important meaning of all—our personally felt identity. Identity is composed of those things we find significant, our values, our relationships, and our beliefs and intentions, so it heavily overlaps the other definitions. When an experience feels deeply personal, engages our agency to help define us and our role in the world, it contributes to building our identity. There is no experience more meaningful. First and foremost, aesthetic experiences are immediate and personal.

If this does not exactly exhaust the exploration, it surely suggests how multifaceted meaning can be, and how pervasive aesthetic experiences might be. Aesthetic experiences might feel meaningful in any of these ways, and likely in more than one of these ways. Our experience of meaning is what makes art and everyday life powerful, more so when some effort is demanded to discern that meaning. When we have to work at it, it is all the more appreciated.

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* Made infamous by US President Bill Clinton in his response to accusations of his infidelity, on the nature of his relationship to the young intern-- “It depends upon what the meaning of the word IS is.” 

Travel, and 3 Problematic Metaphors

It has been said that all the plots of all the stories in the world can be distilled into two general themes: (1) a stranger comes to town, and (2) someone, the hero, goes on a journey. All stories worth telling can be seen as being about how we confront change or new situations, whether these come to us unexpectedly or we find or seek them out by purposefully leaving our comfort zone.

This essay on everyday aesthetics is about the second case, going on a journey, or traveling. However, travel offers a window onto the world that, in the right lighting, when the scene behind it becomes obscure--when the strange becomes virtually unknowable, as it can during travel--also becomes a mirror, such that even these two general themes become blurred. Who is the hero? Who is the stranger?

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Travel can be profound. Unlike some of the topics discussed in this blog on everyday aesthetics, Cooking and Eating, for example, travel is not really something we can or want to do everyday. However, it is highly aesthetic, as I will try to show, even though it is not typically considered in the same company as Art. But travel and Art serve the same purposes--providing meaning, making life special, and more deeply appreciating and participating in life.

Three common reasons offered for why we travel are to “lose oneself,” to “find oneself,” and to “see the world.” We will start with these metaphors, then explore how travel encompasses all of these and more, sharing the same purposes as Art, creating an aesthetic experience.

1
Some say we travel to “lose ourselves.” And indeed travel--or tourism if we want to make that distinction--is often marketed as an escape from the monotony or burnout related to the daily routines that have built up around us. Images of inclined, swimsuited, happy people on the beach, relaxing with eyes closed or shaded by sunglasses, sipping cocktails in the open air under clear skies, or strolling aimlessly and slowly through a wilderness or historic city, suggest a comforting sort of nothingness as the blessed alternative to overwhelming obligations. In reality, true burnout requires a cure that is the opposite of nothingness. And travel can be one of those cures when the space it opens is filled with an engaging new somethingness, whether relaxing or exhilarating.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

But “losing oneself” is a misleading metaphor. Whatever we lose, we still follow our enigmatic selves into even the most novel situations (much to our gain). Truly losing even a part of oneself requires significant effort, which is just what some try to avoid when they travel. The travel we often engage in might might help us temporarily lose habits, obligations, and relentlessly familiarity, and this is a good thing--unless they are simply replaced by new habits that are equally limiting or even more debilitating.

On the other hand, this is not to say that there is no power in boredom, which rather than being frustrating might just create enough hunger for stimulation that it results in creativity. The effort to temporarily reject habits and remain open-minded to new options–this can release creative energy that is otherwise blocked by preoccupation. It might also release playful energy that has been submerged under the weight of obligations. Clearly, both of these are healthy outcomes, but travel can do more as well.

2
Others might say we travel to “find ourselves,” another good but misleading metaphor. These two reasons sound like opposites, and “finding” looks like the proactive and productive one, while the former seems only passive. But they can also be flip sides of the same experience. Losing your current rendition of self creates the opportunity to find other possibilities.

Truly losing oneself requires a great deal of confidence, a willingness to accept and live with uncertainty, and trust that a new self can be found. It also requires a lot of work, both to give up the status quo and to build a new front to face the world, work that few are willing to undertake. Moving to live and work in a new, distant place is especially hard. There is no return ticket ready to take you back to the familiar routine.

“Finding oneself” can mean a lot of things, including adopting new goals, recognizing new strengths and capabilities, finding new perspectives on life and one’s role in it, or discovering a place (geographical or social) where one feels “at home,” where one can fit in, be understood, and apply one’s strengths. Contrary to a surface reading of this metaphor, finding oneself also involves seeing the people around us in new ways, because much of the self is revealed only in the reflections of others. Travel offers the perfect opportunity for all such changes.

Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

Travel is about more than changing our physical environment, although this creates significant impacts in itself. The shift from an urban environment to a wilderness, for example, might create a form of eco-shock if you are not used to it. Being close to trees and water and rocks, and mud and brambles and bugs, or larger and even potentially dangerous wild animals--these can call for new internal resources that force us to respond with new resilience, new selves.

However, those not accustomed to distant travels, where cultural differences are obvious, might not be attuned to the possibility that even short travels are also cultural excursions in which we find people who do things differently from us--and get along just fine doing them that way. Whether across town, or across continents, travel can reveal the breadth of possibilities of human experience. With an open mind, the traveler might begin to question her assumptions. Paul Bowles (1949), in his novel, The Sheltering Sky, offered the distinction that while a tourist “accepts his own civilization without question,” an open-minded traveler “compares it with the others and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” In other words, a traveler is open to change, open even to a new self, while a tourist might find cultural differences simply another one of the attractions or a necessary bother worth the suntan. There is a scene in Frank Capra’s film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where the young protagonist is planning to leave his small hometown to see the world, and has visited a local luggage shop. He asks for the largest trunk available, holding up his hands to indicate a size equal to his own height and width, assuming the size of the suitcase is proportional to the distance one plans to travel. This is, of course, quite the opposite of those who advocate a “vagabonding” approach to travel, where we leave as much of ourselves behind as possible, making our burden light and leaving space for the new things we are sure to find (for example, see Potts, 2002).

The spirit of travel versus tourism requires “crossing a border,” a significance highlighted by Ryszard Kapusinski (2004/2008) in his illuminating memoir, “Travels with Herodotus.” In his case this was the rarely penetrated border of soviet-ruled Poland, which he crossed more than once as a journalist to find India, Africa, and many other distant lands unreachable by most of his readers. That border, for him and for most of us, is to a great deal also the selves we have erected. “Finding oneself” can happen when crossing a cultural border because this transgression shatters barriers that might bind and blind us.

As someone travels, many parts of selves become available to try on--new ways of speaking, new attitudes, new graciousness, new tolerances, new skills and knowledge. The parts can be taken on incrementally, in a crash course, or not at all, depending on your needs and desires. But you don’t have to lose oneself entirely to find something new and useful. These part-selves can arise from the simplest elements in the new places we explore, both natural and human elements.

When we travel we often allow ourselves to explore the small details of a place, the ones we tend to overlook in daily routines. We might become like children, following the ones that “make the familiar strange,” like when we see something under a microscope for the first time. Following small leads to new experiences, which we have more time and opportunity to do when we travel, can lead to revelations. We might see them only out of the corner of our eye, have them rush past us as we move along like things glanced out the window of a train or moving car. Or they might come smashing us head on, like not knowing how to react in a critical situation such as a major disruption to our plans or difficulty addressing a basic need. The details might accumulate. We might not even recognize the evolving changes in ourselves, like a slow infection. Then one day, we realize we are new.

3
Another popular metaphor for why we travel is to “see the world,” to look beyond the limits of oneself. As you might already have guessed, this metaphor is linked to both “losing” and “finding oneself,” because seeing the world is not just seeing new things, but being prepared to see them with new eyes. We all already have a world to see. From our infancy, from the day we are aware, we are already “in the world,” as phenomenologists like Heidegger would put it, partly because we are unavoidably immersed in our social and physical context that so heavily influences how we choose to be (even when we choose to withdrawal from it). Moreover, our consciousness is not really as much self-consciousness, as we are led to believe, as consciousness of the world around us. As phenomenologists might put it, we are aware because we are in the world, and even more so, because we are part of it.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Yet, as the song goes, “there’s such a lot world to see.” There are all the famous sites we have read about and seen in photos, there are all the peoples we have glimpsed in films and heard speaking in strange tongues. There are the mountains, the rivers, the buildings, the landscapes, the seas, the national parks, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few do not want to have the experiences of visiting these. For some, it is a matter of collecting them, like books on a shelf. Other people feel incomplete without them. For them, NOT traveling is like living inside a fenced pasture. They need to jump the fence, cross the border, or they know they will be missing out on the wealth of experience available. And it is not just a matter of seeing things, it is feeling and being new things. Finding new sensations, new selves.

These travel-oriented people may also realize just how finite their lives are, and how special moments can be. As Paul Bowles (1949) put it: “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Travel can be a way of refilling the container, extending the finite, and edging toward the limitless.

As the other metaphors imply, travel is also an inward journey. An acid “trip” came to be called that for the journey it can entail. Some disparage travel as a distraction from the most important journeys one can take, the internal ones. As the underrated Beatles song by George Harrison goes (“The Inner Light,” B-side to the more famous Lady Madonna single):

“Without going out of my door
I can know all things of Earth.
Without looking out of my window
I could know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels
The less one knows”

There’s no place like home. It is not that we do not already have a rich and wonderful world, but that others are also available if we have the urge to look for them.

This talk of losing and finding and seeing the world leads to questions about the substance of a self and a life. Whether a self is defined with the physical boundaries of the skin or the experiential boundaries of a consistent point of view, and whether a life is defined as the sequence of events of an individual self or a process of an evolving interchange between the world and that self, losing oneself is a nonsense proposition. What we really mean when we say we want to lose ourselves is that we want to change how we converse with the world. We want to learn. We want to be enlightened.

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In the end, as useful as the metaphors are, the attraction of travel is better explained in its qualities of aesthetic experience. It often follows the quintessential pattern of artful activity, with a slight twist in that the need, desire, or puzzlement that propels it is often only vaguely defined. In this sense, the conclusion is also open to opportunity--to varying degrees depending on the open-mindedness of the person. We choose to travel based on our trust that all the qualities of an aesthetic experience can be checked off:

• A perceived need or desire: in this case, a desire to explore new things or need to escape from mundane habits, not necessarily a search for specific answers or resolutions. The choice to travel may simply reflect a desire for evidence that raises new questions and mysteries to explore that might force our minds to expand beyond their current narrowness.
• Compelling anticipation: What lies beyond the next corner, the next airport, the next train station, the next mountain pass? What will we find that challenges or rewards our expectations?
• Deep engagement: in the newness of the places visited, historical or natural wonders, challenges faced, people encountered. We need to pay attention or risk losing our way or missing an opportunity.
• Immediate experience: not an experience that comes from media like a TV, computer, tablet, or phone, but directly. A focus on the now, not our past or future, magnified by the influx of sensual details that come with being someplace new.
• A conclusion: a return to a status quo that is somehow no longer the same, a return that can bring the comfort of a rounding out rather than renewed boredom, a return with new eyes, which enhances life by closing a story worth remembering and telling, and, potentially, bringing an internal change that changes everything.

You might notice that all the metaphors for reasons to travel have a place in this pattern of experience. “Losing oneself” is a positive desire when it means opening up to new things or the determination to forget negative experience. Losing oneself, in the form of losing self-consciousness and preoccupation, is also required for deep engagement and immediate experience, for becoming absorbed in the details. “Finding oneself” is a noble goal, a desire that leads to compelling anticipation that new answers and new learning awaits. “Seeing the world” is the opened eye and expanded engagement that arises from anticipation and from attention to the immediate things in the aesthetic experience. Seeing the world means seeing the now that is always there, but frequently lost. It also, of course, means seeing new things that were not available before, but have potential for new impacts—what we came for. It means the power of forgetting and learning how to see in new ways.

What is added to the metaphors is a holistic context, from impulse to resolution. The return is just as important as the journey out, as described in Joseph Cambell’s theories of the power of myth. The return is reaping the reward of the experience. Losing, finding, and seeing combined, and finally taking what we find back to carry on with new energy and insight--this is the powerful thing about travel.

If there is no return but instead a decision to stay, it is no longer travel. It becomes something else, emigration perhaps, or escape, and the metamorphosis is even greater.

(A very nice summary of the metaphors discussed here and more can be found in the essay, Why we travel, by Pico Iyer. Iyer travels the same path, notices different things, and finds different but compatible conclusions.)