Travel and Belonging
I was eight years old the first time I found myself somewhere I did not belong. With a sleeping bag tucked under in my arms, I waved goodbye to my parents as I boarded an Amtrak train along with sixteen other third-graders for a 26-hour journey to a Native American reservation in Arizona. I was finally going to meet my penpal, Collette, who, like me, had dark brown hair, tan complexion and a little sister. Unlike me, she lived with six other family members in a small concrete hut with no running water, no electricity, and a diet limited to what her family grew on the land. Since Colette was not allowed off the reservation, my third grade teacher had convinced hers to let us onto the reservation and spend a week living in the homes of our Hopi Indian counterparts.
Perhaps it was because it was my first time away from my family, or because the raw desert breeze whisked the meaning of time away with the tumbleweeds, or maybe it was because we were prohibited from taking photographs, but that week I drew in every sight, sound and smell as if they would be my last. Being a stranger in a foreign land allowed me, at least for those moments, to release my grip on an identity I inherited and replace it with a feeling as vast as the horizon viewed from the mesa tops: that anything was possible. Colette became my guide into a new world that was not my own, helping me to imagine how it could be.
I helped prepare freshly picked greens for dinner, learned to make blue corn cakes and listened to the drumbeat of their folkloric Kachina dances as Colette performed with a face painted in colors that matched the land and feathers peeking out from behind her silhouette. As the days accumulated, I superimposed myself on her world, letting the layers of what I thought were “me” fall off like dead skin.
In those fleeting moments between letting go of an old identity and consecrating a new one, I found freedom. The peace I received in this kind of raw exposure was the most pure kind I’d ever found. And it was as available to me as an eight-year-old as it is to me today. I just didn’t know it. And because I didn’t know it, I didn’t know how to reclaim it.
Travel, I concluded — the kind where you crossover from an observer to a participant with privileged access to the worlds of others — was the secret elixir to free myself and others from the shackles of our limiting beliefs of who we are and where we belong. Travel had the power to reduce prejudice and increase compassion.
Yet, what I didn’t realize until starting and ending a travel startup, building a meditation practice, and moving to a Buddhist monastery, is that these effects from travel are often short-lived. A much deeper journey — into the fortresses of our inner world — is needed to create the enduring shifts with which travel is a mere flirtation.
