We travel for a lot of reasons, evidently: itchy feet, the love of a culture, the desire to leave it all behind, the need to forget, or the need to see new people.
St Augustine once averred ‘The world is a book, and he who doesn't travel reads only one page.’ That’s because most of us get so caught between commutes and supermarket runs. We forget how to take breaths and smell roses or lantanas or temple flowers or crowsfoot grass. But on the street, every instant represents a new beginning. No day is as before. We can't plan out what will happen because nothing is carved on a stone. No commutes, no errands, no scheduled meetings, just us and our caprice. Everything is so different that months begin to feel like years.
Anyway, where should we travel these days and what places should we avoid? Well, let’s go just about any which place we want. For one, if we’re disposed to put up with some uneasiness and able to be flexible with our whereabouts, the recompenses of travel in troubled places are vast. Such travel can show us the downright senselessness of much human conflict and the inspiring ways people manage to live their lives.
We need to travel to appreciate life in the world and realise how others express their humanity. Rough travel can be, well, coarse, and at times the lessons learned come only on second thought, but they are lessons worth learning, at this time and at some point.
Recognisably, we travel, largely, to mislay ourselves or to discover ourselves. We travel to uncover our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our mass media will cover. We travel to take along what little we can, in our ignorance and understanding, to those parts of the earth whose treasures are dispersed and isolated in its own way. Regina Nadelson, a writer, said that most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.
When we travel, strikingly, we leave all our philosophies and faiths at home, seeing everything we think we know in a different light, and from a warped perspective.
We travel, then, in part just to stir our satisfactions by seeing all the ethical and radical insistences, the pivotal catches, that we by the skin of our teeth ever have to face at home. Travel is the best way we have of freeing the humanity of places, and saving them from construct and philosophy.
In the course, we also get saved from construct ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we break in our journey, and how much we can become a carrier in transporting from side to side what every place needs. We can always take pinasugbo or pancit Molo to Baguio, and bring Igorot woodcarvings or Ifugao baskets back to Iloilo.
But more tellingly, we hand on ideals and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many places, we come to be mobile audio-visual monitors and breathing broadsheets, the only networks that can take people out of the bowdlerised limits of their birthplaces. In out-of-the-way or hard-up places, we are the eyes and ears of the people we bump into, their only connection with the world outside and, every so often, the closest, fairly factually, they will ever come to Charice or Kris or Boy or Angel or Phil or Manny or Marian. Not the least of the dares of travel, for that reason, is learning how to embrace, and carry across, thoughts with sensitivity.
In consequence, travel turns us about in dualistic ways coincidentally: it shows us the marvels and values and matters that we might ordinarily close our eyes to, but it besides, and more openly, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might if not grow tarnished. For in travelling to a truly distant place, we inescapably travel to humours and states of mind and unknown innermost paths that we’d otherwise seldom have reason to visit.
We travel, then, in search of self-worth and facelessness, and, undeniably, in finding the one, we catch the other. We make a night of it, follow whim, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are besotted with someone. We live without a past or future, for a moment at best, and are ourselves for the taking and open to interpretation. We even may become ambiguous, to others, at first, and on occasion to ourselves.
Travelling is a style to reverse time, to an insignificant magnitude, and make a day last a year, and travelling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in early years, with what we cannot recognise.
Travel allows for adjustment. The fresh, the exhilarating, the different, and the adventure, it’s all there when we travel. Our days no longer are verbalised by business hours but by the changing breezes of our own sentiment. We all want something different from our routine, something to dare us. People thrive on diversity. It is hardwired into our nuts. Nobody comes about and is thankful for parking herself eight hours in a workspace. All we point out is breaking free from it. Breaking the ramparts down and going somewhere diverse.
In our seat on a bus or L300 van we could be in a compulsory state of tranquillity, and moving already, there would be no need for momentum, but we’re not there so far, so we’re some degree of to the activities on the way: reading, thinking, looking out the window, and these are the kinds of things we would like time to do more of. Stationary, yet there’s the exciting edge of eagerness, the opportunity that comes with arriving somewhere new.
The changing landscape outside our window more often than not provides a lot to muse, the immense expanses, the cheerful, surprising colours of towns or the far-reaching view of highlands. Places to pass through can offer a surprising rich sojourn, a way to capture the real thrill of travelling and perhaps have some startling thoughts or happenstances, like they used to.
‘A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving’ said Lao Tzu. OK, have just the sense, will travel.
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