Author Pico Iyer on Travel—The Antidote to Sleepwalking Through Your Days
A taxi driver in Burma took him “further and further” from the main road. Pico was “increasingly unsure. Would I get robbed?” He was taken to a room with two beds and asked to sit down.
The 25-year-old taxi driver took out his “most prized possession,” an album of postcards he had received from all over the world. “He was a mathematician and longed to get a graduate degree. But he was stuck as a taxi driver.”
Pico returned home and continued to correspond with him. When Burmese government repression intensified, Pico didn’t hear from him for 25 years. Reminiscing on his time in the country, Pico wrote a book that included the taxi driver.
A stranger in the US contacted Pico. He said he and his wife were in Burma and their taxi driver asked “Have you heard of Pico?” They had a letter to forward to him. But the letter never came.
Eventually another stranger contacted Pico and said that in Burma their taxi driver had asked “Have you heard of Pico” The driver was very proud that Pico had included him in his book. The stranger said he would forward him a letter from the driver. This time it arrived. The driver was now fifty years old.
Pico learned that back in the day, a couple from Texas was moved by the taxi driver’s story and his goals and gave him enough money to pursue his dreams.
But eventually another tourist from Italy heard about his “great secret dream to be a photographer.” The tourist offered to give him a camera in exchange for old Burmese banknotes.
The — now former — taxi driver gave him the banknotes and they agreed to meet on the corner of a street for the camera. The Italian never showed up.
“Stripped of his worldly belongings,” he could not even afford to take up his former profession as a taxi driver. It took him another ten years of hard work to become a driver again.
In such “unimaginable stories…lives are shifted from better to worse. The driver was liberated and then wiped clean.”
“As a traveler you are an ambassador of yourself, of your culture, of humanity.”
“You have a return ticket, but your encounters have profound gravity for the people you are meeting.”
And then you return home. Travel for Pico is a fresh outlook on “home.” “Home is the place you stop paying attention. You assume you can sleepwalk through your days.” And then you travel and it is a “separation from your routine.” You need “new eyes” to process your unfamiliar environment. The “best places are the ones that leave you permanently unsettled.” Cuba is “the saddest, most exuberant, most disenchanted, romantic, idealist” place he has ever been. It “refused to settle in [his] boxed ideas.” Then you “return from travels and look at your home as if you are a foreigner.”
Travel is “transformative” and “illuminating.” It’s like “you rebel against your parents and then you become them. You run past your past until you become your past. You enjoy the benefits of modern society — internet, flight price trackers, etc — and hope that other countries remain in a picturesque state. We all long for what we don’t have in life.”
Pico’s home for the past 30 years has been Japan on a tourist visa. Every 89th day, he returns to the US. As a foreigner in Japan, he is like a “bomb in carefully fashioned harmony.” He married a Japanese woman and when his future mother-in-law saw him “she sobbed for three hours. She had grown up during the occupation and probably thought, as a foreigner, [he] was a spy.”
He lives in a two-room house in Japan so small, the bathroom door doesn’t open all the way. He owns no bike, car, newspapers, or magazines. The “ultimate luxury is a matter of what you don’t need.” He “used to live in Manhattan,” a world of “material abundance, but [he] was missing something invisible.”
“Two Japanese gifts are stillness and concentration.” For Pico, “in Japan the day lasts a thousand hours.” He writes for several hours at “his stepdaughter’s desk surrounded by Brad Pitt pictures.” He “eats a tangerine on the tiny balcony.” He “plays two hours of furious ping pong with a local grandmother.” He then still has six hours left. He “has a spacious existence.”
Pico finds everything he needs “in the few things around him.” Whether at home or abroad, “in one flower you find all you need. If you don’t see anything, you look closer…the harder you look, the more you see.”
To further explore travel through the nomadic authors who have spoken at National Geographic, check out:
