How to Survive Your Return From Travel: A Philosophical Guide
Resfeber: The restless race of the traveller’s heart before the journey begins, when anxiety and anticipation are tangled together.
Travel; proper, long term travel has become a rite of passage for middle-class Australians. It is a time of becoming after high school where upto a year is spent in travel, usually in Europe, sometimes in other places on a cultural adventure.
I had been dying to travel since listening to the adventures of Chris, a German who worked with me at one of the 3 jobs I held while at Uni. We had up to 60 travelers work with us each season and I plumbed them all for information on their experiences. I had been overseas on trips, but I had wanted to establish my credentials, reputation, and career and buy a house before devoting serious time to travel. I worked incredibly hard, got 2 more post-grad qualifications and moved cities several times to stare opportunity in the face. I spent a decade living life with a very narrow view to that end but achieved nothing of material value from it. For all of my planning it ended up being a one-time do or die, no training, no plan and no building process that got me to Turkey, Europe, Morocco, Kenya and the UK in 2015. What are you supposed to do with that? There’s no lesson except that there’s no lesson.
Europeans come to Australia for different reasons than we go over there. Europeans are looking for the wild in Australia. They want to see our dangerous animals, our arid desert, the vastness of empty space. Australia is a wild and ancient countryside but Europeans will romanticise that aspect of it, a lot, emphasising their connection with the primal. By comparison, Australians may go looking for cultural ideas, beautiful artworks and possibly inspiration. We mostly look for refinement and to sharpen our cognitive ratio’s, to become sensitive, multi-layered beings across physical limitations, to look into the past to try and understand the present.
Although both groups are looking for something quite specific and that seem at odds with each other, we both seek the same thing — it is what we feel that we are missing from our environment. We need to break out, to add to ourselves. In our experience we build this up, romanticise it and grow it into the biggest, most powerful and exaggerated example of itself using the things and events we encounter to then engulf and own it ourselves.
While I was traveling I wrote some fiction that had an existentialist philosophy feel to it. It was a book for travelers, about the transformative experience of traveling; but it could be extrapolated to life in general.
The book was metaphor across several substrates. It explicitly dealt with death, life and then death, but involved a cross-over into the abyss, into the netherworld. Without having ever been aware of it, the book was also a heroes journey tale.
Early in the book I had written about the promise of travel. There is a promise inherent in the intention, in the original idea of travelling. An unspoken motivation or willpower pushes us to take these steps. We are aware of potential danger, of entering the chaotic unknown, of actually stepping into the abyss, of actually undergoing a heroes journey. We do it because we divine that something must come of it, it is more than leisure; it is something necessary.
And so, before we leave… resfeber! A heightened awareness, possible anxiety and positive expectation are mixed together in a feeling so nuanced that Sweden invented a word for it.
Most of us will go on to have a phenomenal time exploring the globe and without too many questions. In spite of that, while I was in Morocco I knew that although I loved being there that feeling was dependent on knowing that I could leave at any time and never face the reality of Morocco as a permanent and overbearing reality. But in realising this we must realise that we are there to get something, even if we also give, and attempt some symbiosis.
There is no reason to expect good things to happen to us traveling — sometimes they don’t, and they can go very wrong. We are strangers in strange lands, a fact noticeable on sight, from our look, demeanor and especially when we open our mouths. We rely on a belief of inherent goodness of humans again and again. We end up with a lot of evidence to support our good faith.
This modern Western middle-class coming of age ritual has an incredible amount in common with other rituals across the world. In Kenya, the Maasai go into the wild and kill a Lion before being accepted as adults by the tribe, amongst other cultural rituals. In Australia, some aboriginal tribes used to give children cultural lessons, knowledge and history and have them survive in the Australian bush by themselves for 6 months. If you’ve been you will know that this task is of a deadly serious nature. And if you can survive that then maybe you are useful to the group. But in travel, this most tribal of reckonings, we must go out alone, separate to our parents or tribe and survive on our own. We have to defeat the thing that looms largest over us, whether that is a Lion or survival in the worlds harshest environment. Maybe it is thriving in a deadly land such as Australia, or engaging with the cultural depths of Europe?
I don’t know if people would even believe my stories from traveling, such as hanging out with teenaged gangsters in Tangier, leveraging our relationship of buying hash with them to get an American boy we just barely met out of trouble — they perceived that he owed for a debt he gathered for accepting directions. I could tell they had the potential to be vicious and so we negotiated on the Americans behalf. They told me later that they would have taken him for a walk, got him lost in the medina and held him up with a knife, taking whatever they wanted.
We ended up having some drinks with the mini-gangsters on the balcony of a dusty old royal palace in the casbah overlooking the marina, the city of Tangier and from which we could see Spain. There are other details I have to leave out but in that one week alone a friend and I had many similar experiences that we would never forget.
Other times I (with other people) was chased by wild dogs in Turkey behind a beach the army guarded, I pepper-sprayed an English guy (for repeatedly doing the same thing to animals), hitch-hiked in Milan when the trains didn’t work eventually sleeping on the street, met a world leading expert on cheese (South America was his expertise but he could tell you the national palate for any cheese he tried), hung out with girls I had never met in Venice and drank red wine next to the canal out of plastic cups without ever sharing a word of English. We stumbled across St Marco square unintentionally! Such a rush to encounter something so beautiful, historic and fascinating by folly and with girls from an international but exotic city like Istanbul. And a beautiful thing to share an experience without language.
I was propositioned by a bi-sexual but in the closet Jewish guy from New York studying Law at NYU while in Edinburgh. He was so palpably stereotypical and so self-aware of that, making him so much more stereotypical and neurotic. There was a hint that his experiment with sexuality might have been a way to try to escape the crushing inevitability of his life trajectory- of where he ‘knew’ he was headed, that he must know he was headed not as much by knowing as being unable to get away from this knowing. It may have been an act of rebellion from what God had planned.
We performed a pagan full moon ritual on the beach in Olympus. I took a motorbike as a pillion passenger through a traffic jam in Nairobi with 30kg of luggage to catch a flight I almost missed. I met a girl in French class in Morocco and we visited Rome together 3 weeks later.
Early on in the trip I was misunderstood, friends manipulated against me and became persona non grata of the group I originally travelled with! The next person I travelled with I had met in Belgium, we travelled in Turkey and 2 weeks into that we realised that we had already met and spoken to each other 2 months earlier after the running of the bulls (also known as the running of the Australians), catching a bus from Pamplona to San Sebastien!
All this just off the top of my head, I could really go on and on.
But for this unknowable process, this exercise you embark on, what happens if you manage to achieve this thing from traveling? You have entered the abyss and have dug into some deep and missing truth to the existence of your being. You come back. But do you come back?
That anxious, excited, potentially dark feeling of resfeber is potentiality. We seek something unknown. In fact it is the unknown itself that we seek. The world is full of forces that we wish to find and embrace and view and understand and put in some kind of place, some context, to construct some kind of order. Through doing this in the world the biggest force that eventually emerges is ourselves; and we especially wish to place that in some kind of order.
So when you step out into the world to travel, especially alone and without familiar frames of reference and experience so many places and people and events, it is possible that you never return. You change, you must change and so you never come back. You knew it was like this — it’s why you did it, and you have found so many of the tools through which to perform this transcendent process while you went city to city country to country person to person.
Something else comes back than what we started with; we want to be bigger, stronger, more cultured, more capable. It could be all of those things. Maybe it’s also uglier, more confronting. Maybe you come back to meet the unfinished business spread across your life, lurking in your background, knocking on the door of this new person saying ‘let me in!’.
Adjusting to life afterward is not necessarily easy. It’s been difficult for me. I started writing this after reading about somebody else's experience here. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-15/this-is-why-loneliness-affects-so-many-of-my-generation/11781182.
So, how to survive our return from travel?
Some people never tether themselves again; I recently stayed at an air-bnb with a German who came to Australia 25 years ago. The typical German and European travelers romanticisation of Australia embraces the hippy lifestyle from half a century ago. From half a century ago. They change their clothes, they take up new interests such as fire twirling, buddhism, other eastern spirituality e.t.c. and explore these earnestly. This man found what they are all looking for and 25 years and 2 adult Australian children later is still living that faux-hippy lifestyle. But at the best of times the revolutionary discovery is a lurch between extremes, to which we must ask ourselves — is this part of Western society, culture and civilisation missing that much, to such an extreme view that to completely flip it on its head still feels more honest 50 years later? Since the 1960’s people have potentially taken a kind of attitude of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ after serious travel. People risk becoming disengaged and never engaging again. I’m still a risk of it.
Life in 2019 is highly complex in one sense, but should not be as grim as it was in the 60’s. Imagine knowing that your culture had deep structural issues in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or even 90’s but knowing that any real change is at least decades away?
For us today, change is upon us. It is here, with the rate of change increasing. With the collapse of old political narratives and traditional institutions that both guaranteed culture and stability, we face a degenerative spiral in our society. We are quickly re-evaluating many ideas about ourselves, about our culture and perceptions in the Western world. After a period of cultural destruction, we now need new Michaelangelo’s, new Aristotles, new builders of new things. We have to take risks, to keep bashing ourselves and our ideas around, especially those of us with an active interest in travel, in worldwide culture and humanity at large.
This involves individuals creating meaning, of using their depressive experiences, of their let-downs, failures and disconnected but developing views. What we need more than anything in the Western world is the vitality and strength of new ideas that survive all these things, forged by individuals who have been to the wilderness and killed the lion, and who can put their hand on their heart about something, even just one thing and proclaim ‘this is true!’. It’s not academic, scientific, religious or philosophical, and it’s as easy as taking decisive action on anything at all. One must engage.
Do you enjoy drinking a tea in the morning in a quiet moment before you start your day? That’s what we need. Why should it not be a passion?
Do you have a view of masculinity where men should be capable of physical confrontation and you have joined a fighting gym? That’s what we need. Let’s see if an honestly expressed masculinity is capable of ‘toxicity’.
Do you enjoy the sunrise, of getting up early and perhaps taking pictures of them? Then you must do it! We need it!
Do you think that women should not do any cooking or cleaning and that a feminine revolution is at hand? That’s what we need! Let’s discover if it is true!
Because above all, in this bizarre simulacra, the nihilism we have seen in the 80’s and 90’s, the regression to Judeo-Christian morality, ethics and religion afterwards and the absurdity of the last 5 years, of corporate pop culture, of degenerating ideologies, of a shrinking pool of cultural ideas and a political collapse; to survive after traveling you have to become you. To figure out what you like at the most basic level. No wrong answers, no second opinions, no apologies, no checking with anybody to do anything, and if it is difficult to manifest this by only doing it for yourself, you have been given the gift of knowledge and you must do it for yourself; for everybody else.
