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?

-----------------

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.

-------------------------

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.)