#54: Traveling Travails
A shred of context for future posts
Hey,
Let’s put the news back in newsletter! lol. I just got back from a trip to Thailand and Vietnam that I took to celebrate the end of my first year teaching in Korea. I had lots of time to think and so naturally I thought about travel and its purpose; why I want to do it, what other people say about it. Is it necessary? An unqualified good? What kind of people move abroad, and what kind of people travel as a lifestyle? I’ve met many expats and travelers in the last year; I’m curious about the motivations of people with restless feet. There were times when I was in a throng of backpackers—so, so many dusty Europeans flaunting their annual six weeks of paid holiday in my face—and felt very strange indeed. Why can’t any of us stay home?
I was always jealous of people who travel, and drawn to art that people make about travel. A big part of the reason I moved to Korea was because I thought it would be adjacent to traveling. It has made taking certain trips easier, although my normal life doesn’t feel much different than it would in America. My lifestyle isn’t closer to travel; the biggest difference is which parts of the world are more accessible and affordable. I could manage a trip to southeast Asia now, when I couldn’t before.
I departed with the intention of Resisting Narrative. I wanted to push against the urge to make a story of the trip, a Three Act play with a climax and a neat ending and lessons learned. Before I left, I tried to ignore the whisper that said, afterwards your regular life will feel new again, fresh; everything will feel different than before. Even though it does feel different, since I’m home. I could get addicted to that newness. Mark Twain has a famous quote:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
I could quibble with nearly all of that statement; for example, most of the modern travel industry caters to the ease and convenience of its consumers. It has never been so easy to travel, and so possible to leave home and remain as sheltered and pampered as before—yet there is truth in it, too. Seeing how other people live and eat and work, acquiring the sense that the world is big and has been ticking right along for millennium and there are many ways to go about it—life—and the habits and the traditions of your countrymen are not the best and only way to do things—those are Realizations, if not necessarily fatal to bigotry.
But I think that messages like Twain’s contribute to the romanticized view in our culture of travel as a vessel for transformation. We use travel as a symbol for a kind of enlightenment. Culture writer Haley Nahman wrote that going on a big but ultimately not life changing trip to Italy made it easier for her to make the decision to have a kid; international travel being one of the tenets of the intelligentsia, upheld as a philosophy. As in, it’s absurd to have a kid or settle down until you’ve tasted the fruits of independence, best consumed in the hills of Tuscany in the form of an orange slice atop an Aperol Spritz. (Can you imagine anything less worldly than someone saying they don’t like to travel? It’s such an implied moral good.) Wanting to travel is shorthand for being the sort of person who is engaged with the world, who is curious, flexible, capable of making an effort and taking action.
After Nahman’s trip, she found that the epiphanies of life at home weren’t necessarily less rewarding than the epiphanies of travel. When you return from your travels, life goes on and you are still you, more or less. Nahman suggests that the point of travel can be about coming home with a fresh appreciation.
“To imagine that it doesn’t have to be about changing you fundamentally, or testing out new paths to find the right one. It can be about vacating your normal for the express purpose of being placed gently back down where you started, re-contextualizing who you’ve always been, or what you’ve always done.”
I returned to that idea a few times on my trip; the point isn’t for travel to change everything. Traveling doesn’t have to transform us for it be worth it. The point is to be as awake and here as possible, wherever that here is. Phi Phi or Rome, the midwest or Korea.
Why travel? In part because it is a novelty, a force that keeps us from digging the deep grooves of habit that facilitate cruise control instead of active living. It’s like the benefits of rearranging the furniture if you are depressed. Disruptions are healthy. Our brains are always working to be as lazy and efficient as possible; stepping away from the daily schedule and surroundings forces us to examine what is left. Who are you when you don’t have all your comforts, all the little things that help you cope? Being uncomfortable forces us to pay attention. Traveling is less comfortable than being at home, so it’s good at sharpening your attention.
Now I’m a Woman Who Travels Alone ™ and here is what I came back with. Lots of energy to play, to be with the people I love, to create and bond and nestle in for the colder months. To write more, share more. I wrote a little about my (mis) adventures, and I’ll post it over the next couple weeks. Influenced by Alexander Chee’s Letters from London, I wrote it in third-person. It was fun!
Thanks for reading. Praying my head off for America this week. XOXO Angie
I love this, Angie! Can’t wait to read about the travels over the next few weeks! 😊