"This is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space.
You return a different person...
Many people don't want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people's lives while never really leaving their own. They try to bring their world with them wherever they go , or try to re-create the world they left. They do not want to risk the security of their own understanding and see how small and limited their experiences really are...
To be a real traveler you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the center of your universe. You must believe in the lives of the people and places where you find yourself, even if it undermines your faith in the life you left behind.
You need to share with them, participate with them. Sit at their tables, go to their streets. Struggle with their language. Tell them stories of your life and hear the stories of theirs. Watch how they love each other, how they fight each other. See what they value and what they fear. Feel the spaces they keep.
Become part of the fabric of their everyday lives and you will get a sense of what it means to live in their world. Give yourself over to them - embrace them rather than judge them - and you will find that the beauty in their lives and their worlds will become part of yours.
When you move on, you will have grown. You will realize that the possibilities of life in this world are endless, and that beneath our differences of language and culture we all share the dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow.
But travel is not as romantic and exotic as it sounds. The familiar will always call, and your sense of rootlessness will not give you rest. Your emotions will fly crazily in all directions until sometimes you will feel that you have lost your moorings. If you travel alone, the warmth of families and couples will break you heart, and your loneliness will plunge you to depth you did not think possible.
And then, there are greater dangers. You may wake up and discover that you have become a runner who uses travel as an escape from the problems and complication of trying to build something with your life. You may find that you were gone one hour or one day or one month too long, and that you no longer belong anywhere or to anyone. You may find that you have been caught by the lure of the road and that you are a slave to dissatisfaction with any life that forces you to stay in one place.
These things happen. But how much worse is it to be someone whose dreams have been buried beneath the routines of life and who no longer has an interest in looking beyond the horizon?
I believe it is worth taking the risk. How else will you know the feeling of standing on something ancient, or hearing the silent roar of empty spaces? How else will you be able to look into the eyes of a man who has no education, never left his village and does not speak your language and know that the two of you have something in common? How else will you know, in your heart, that the whole world is precious and that every person and place has something unique to offer?
And when there are tragedies or great changes in your life, how else will you truly understand that there are a thousand, a million ways to live, and that your life will go on to something new and different and every bit as worthy as the life you are leaving behind?
These lessons and more will have etched a new element in your character. You will know the cutting moments of life, where fear meets adventure and loneliness meets exhilaration. You will know what it feels like to almost run, but instead to say. You will have come to the edge of a precipice and jumped, so you will always know what it means to say yes or no when another jump confronts you in your life.
These lessons and memories will remain with you always, and will serve as a comfort and a guide as you go through your life...
But more than that, because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. Because I have traveled, I know what parts of me I cannot deny and what parts of me are simply choices that I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much life is pure chance and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am.
And when I am old and my body has begun to fail me, my memories will be waiting for me. They will lift me and carry my over mountains and oceans. I will hold them and turn them and watch them catch the sunlight as they come alive once more in my imagination...
This is why we need to travel. If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.
The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances that the traveler has to take. But if you take them, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. In the end you will be so much richer, so much clearer, so much happier and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you have gained."
From Kent Nerburn's chapter on Travel (pgs. 111-115) in his book Letters to my Son (1999).
Thanks to Brooke for introducing me to this chapter.
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