What the German Language Reveals About Travelling
As any ten-year-old can tell you, the English verb to break something is primarily used to indicate the act of dividing a solid matter into smaller fragments. Its roots lie in the Old High German word brehhan which is also, maybe not surprisingly, the root of the German word brechen, which has the equivalent meaning of the English verb mentioned earlier. Similarly, one can translate the English to break open or to break up into German simply by including the prefix auf in order to transform the verb into aufbrechen.
Interestingly, this newly created verb not only has the same meaning as its direct English counterparts, but it is also used in order to express the concept of setting in motion, leaving some place or starting a journey.
If you think about it carefully, using that particular verb to indicate the moment one sets out on an expedition makes perfect sense. Undertaking a trip always also means leaving some other place and that is exactly the moment when the shattering to pieces happens. Travelling means first and foremost breaking up all those chains that keep you anchored to your past. Setting out to go somewhere means detaching oneself from old ties that need to be broken.
As such, it always involves the underlying assumption that one is not satisfied with his old habits, the people one surrounds oneself with or, more generally, with the atmosphere of the place one is leaving behind. Only the unsatisfied, the bored, the annoyed among us start travelling the world. Why otherwise would one ever want to break up all chains? It is no coincidence that exactly those adjectives that can be used to describe travelers, are much more frequently associated with teenagers or young adults rather than the more established and settled generations of society.
It is important to highlight that the breaking of ties is not exclusively limited to the dismantling of external factors that might leave us dissatisfied such as our relationships with friends and loved ones or our current living conditions such as housing and career progression. It includes also the breaking of personal habits and behavioral traits that frequently cause boredom and unhappiness. Obviously, no journey starts with an impulse that solely belongs to either one of these categories and often a combination of various determining factors lets one make the bold move to go on a trip and break those heavy chains.
The main issue is that most people nowadays set out on a journey because they want to set themselves free from those habits that tied them to their prior location and hope that the new place will induce them to develop more pleasant behavioral patterns. However, what they don’t realize is that it were not those old habits that were particularly boring, harmful or annoying but that any habit will end up being mundane sooner or later, irrespective of the place they are formed in. Leaving with the purpose of arriving somewhere is therefore not what sets one free but rather the act of travelling in itself. It is the constant breaking up of ties that we human beings are after. We are travelers, explorers and adventure seekers who will always look for opportunities to break up all ties that render our lives boring. We should therefore always be in motion, restless and relentless, for all ties ever formed will at some point in time be viewed as heavy chains that pull us down.
This urge to constantly change the well-established, to seek the unknown and unexperienced rather than boredom, is one of the most important characteristics of us human beings. It is thanks to this urge that individuals manage to learn, improve and live a purposeful life and help the entire species move forward. Therefore, the next time you hear someone (it could be your inner self) pronounce the phrase to set out for a journey, stop for a moment and think instead:
Lass uns auf eine Reise aufbrechen!
Let us break up for a journey!
