Chronicling the Journey
Travel writing is a multifaceted exercise with equal benefits to the writer and the reader. As the author explores a place, people, customs, event, she begins to identify with the socio-cultural and historical conditions that constitute it. And through one’s own personally crafted expression, the storyteller is changed. The readers, too, are changed as they engage the story woven with place, politics, people and perspective. T.S. Eliot once said, “The journey not the arrival matters.” That is precisely the hope of what is captured amidst the details of these posts — the journey to place. While the places may come alive with background details, the discovery process, and the connections that are often missed by the casual observer, it is the turn to the inner journey from the outward travels that represents the ultimate destination. What we take away from our travels is often proportional to what we bring to them, as Samuel Johnson noted in 1791, “In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.”
These sojourning entries are designed to help us all see more than we miss over the course of our journey.
Travel in itself is an enjoyable past-time, adventurously exhilarating if you enjoy being culturally, gastronomically, geographically, and in all other ways off balance. But to venture past self-imposed boundaries in an effort to develop empathy, mindfulness, and more-than-superficial knowing, means that we may encounter dialectics that will challenge us to the core. Our prejudices become more apparent. Our fears and insecurities haunt us in fresh ways as we loosen our grip on the small, familiar space that gives us confidence and in which we define civilization. We may find that the only consistent, and shared, part of the path is the ever changing horizon ahead of us. As the journey takes on a life of its own we are changed — more spontaneous, agile, and grace-filled, less myopic, materialistic, and self-absorbed. Given that, spinning a factual, fanciful, romantic, insightful, adrenaline-pumping, please-tell-me-more yarn about the places we’ve been and people we’ve encountered can double the reward — because we get to relive the experience for the benefit of others.
I invite you to wake up, get out of your chair, grab your note pad (or iPad), and begin seeing your travel with literary eyes. You’ll never look at a journey the same way again! As master travel writer Bill Bryson said, “You don’t necessarily have to go far to achieve something memorable. You just have to be able to see things in a different way.”
