Why do we travel?
In 2018, for our generation in America, to be is to travel. But why do we go?
At the core of our obsession, there seems to lie a drive to conquer something through geographic movement; something I believe cannot be conquered. I am confronted today with the reality of my own desperate, craving crusade to experience novelty; my seeking, scraping fight to be viewed as someone wizened by such newness; and my use of these two selfish pursuits to define an arching narrative of life.
As I explore, I desire to claim each new moment, each photographed second of new adventure as my own, to be one with it, if even for an instant (and then, of course, to share with others my great — albeit curated — achievement). As a people, we seek the unique, the novel, the next, the thing to save us and push us to that final plane of of fulfillment, happiness.
This line of thought is a myth. There is no pot of gold at the end of a traveler’s rainbow, no final fix or fulfilling attainment to be found in newness of experience. As such, pursuit of travel as an end in itself will result in regret, disillusionment, failure. This search, this journey, this hunger for adventure will leave us, amongst other things, profoundly empty.
Moreover, travel on a large scale can be immensely damaging. Given: 1) the explosion of hyper-wealth in the western world, 2) the increasing ease/accessibility of travel for those possessing such wealth, and 3) the frenzied mainstreaming of the ‘wanderlust’ narrative in our culture, we are swiftly diluting, corrupting, diminishing, defeating the world’s great places of cultural significance and natural magnificence while fostering neglect and decline within those places less endowed with intellectual or aesthetic splendor. Amongst the authors contemplating this issue, the great American farmer-poet Wendell Berry does so perhaps most coherently and his Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community is a must read on the topic.
I want to be clear though. In spite of these sad realities, traveling isn’t all bad. In fact, there are few things which hold the possibility to be more life giving when pursued rightly. Traveling expands the mind. It relieves us from the ignorance of the particular, the provincial. It endows us with a love and an awe for place, for culture, for experience outside of (and often contradictory to) our own.
This though is the hard part of travel, the seeing of things through a different lens, the learning to live honestly with new knowledge of differing perspectives, beliefs, experiences. For, even in the midst of the very act which makes this enlightenment possible, we fight against its potential good.
Our natural human tendency is to make things easy for ourselves. So, we do. We confront our new task of cultural adaptability during travel by seeking to make others like ourselves. Don’t believe me? Just look at the physical infrastructure and unspoken expectations bolted onto any tourist destination in the world; evidence of other cultures losing their uniqueness and becoming more like our own.
But, people are more difficult. When our conquest to remake them in our image falls short, we slowly begin to resent some differences and embrace or glorify others. Resent gets us nowhere of course. But, neither does pursuit or glorification of narratives which we cannot authentically inherit and don’t truly understand.
Nonetheless, we use our resources to pad our travel experience from these painful realities. And resources are something we have in abundance, so to a significant extent, we are successful in our attempt. In the process, we diminish the very thing traveling gave us in the first place while expanding our already enormous footprints through careless, extractive short-term relationships (platonic, romantic, economic or otherwise) and messy, unsustainable stewardship of our planet’s dwindling resources.
Our travel, if there is a chance for it be anything more than a wasteful exercise in self-indulgence, must resist these forces, must consciously effort not to find ease, but to wrestle with the tension and the discomfort and the uncertainty to the point where we begin to glimpse that beautiful horizon of recognition, respect, and empathy of people, culture, and place not our own.
Frankly, given the vast chasms of historical experience, such glimpses eternal are beyond our ability to ever fully grasp. And there we are again, back to the grasping, desperate nature of it all. If exploration and increased knowledge of the world is to teach us something of real, lasting worth and merit, perhaps it is to stop this grasping once and for all. To release our control. To surrender to the immense glory of He who made us.
