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Why We Travel

1.7 Why We Travel We travel initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our Newspaper will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemBody>&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;h1&gt;&lt;span style=&quot;color: #ff0000;&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt; in spirit/interest&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;</div>" href="https://arsodenglishclasses.com/glossary/in-essence/" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">in essence, to become young fools again-to slow time down and get taken in and fall in love once more. The beauty of this <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemBody>&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;h1 style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;the process of how we enjoy &lt;strong&gt;&lt;span style=&quot;background-color: var(--vk-color-accent-bg); font-size: 28px;&quot;&gt;travelling.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;</div>" href="https://arsodenglishclasses.com/glossary/whole-process/" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">whole process (how we enjoy travelling) was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemBody>&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;h1 style=&quot;text-align: center;&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;सांतायाना&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;img class=&quot;alignnone size-medium wp-image-11135&quot; src=&quot;https://arsodenglishclasses.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/js-300x300.webp&quot; alt=&quot;js&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;300&quot; /&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;</div>" href="https://arsodenglishclasses.com/glossary/george-santayana/" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">George Santayana in his lapidary (important/related) essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape (get free from) into open solitudes (loneliness), into aimlessness (without purpose or direction:), into the moral holiday (going is tough, or could turn tough at any moment/enjoying adventurous holiday) of running some pure hazard (risk), in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled (force) to work desperately (seriously) for a moment at no matter (it is of no importance) what.”   Few of us ever forget the connection (difference) between “travel” and “travail,” (painful or laborious effort) Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion (feeling/expectation) - of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously (clearly) be uncaring (not feeling interest in or attaching importance to something); while feeling without seeing can be blind (lacking perception, awareness, or judgement). Yet for me the first great joy of travelling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties (thoughts of the people) at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light (way/ A way of presenting or perceiving something such that it appears differently to the way it would appear by an alternative presentation or perception), and from a crooked (out of place) angle. Though it’s fashionable (representing a current popular style) nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions (a thing or thought without proof/information / धरणा) at home, and those who don’t (leave assumptions). Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo - or Cuzco (कुज्को) or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same. But for the rest of us, the sovereign (sovin/ supreme/ great) freedom of travelling comes from the fact that it whirls (move) you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted (to accept without question or objection) on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism (information). [One can acquire permission (passport) to travel to foreign countries for educational purposes based on her academic achievements (diploma) and travelling to foreign countries enriches one the most regarding the knowledge and wisdom of the world.] And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional (temporary) and provincial (small area) are the things we imagine to be universal (must be given a great importance). We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies (कम्प्लेसन्सी /आत्मसंतुष्टता/ feeling of quiet pleasure or security) by seeing all the moral and political urgencies (importance), the life-and-death dilemmas (a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives / दुविधा), that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines (to get more information which we read in the newspaper). When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince (the capital and most populous city of Haiti.), for example, where there is almost no paving (a surface made up of flat stones laid in a pattern) your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction शून्यमनस्कता (the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events) and ideology.   And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon (a gullible person/ messanger) - an anti-Federal Express (a major American cargo airline), if you like - in transporting back and forth (to and fro/ around) what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan (US basketball player) posters to Kyoto(an industrial city in central Japan), and bring woven ikebana (इकेबाना / the art of Japanese flower arrangement) baskets back to California. But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished इम्पावरिश्ट (गरीब) places, like Pagan(पेगन) or Lhasa (the capital of Tibet) or Havana(the capital of Cuba,), we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import - and export - dreams with tenderness (kindness). By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust प्रोस्ट (French novelist) line about how the real voyage (a long journey involving travel by sea or in space) of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing