I’ve always found that there is a big difference between ‘travel’ and ‘vacations’. Nowadays, taking a vacation would seem to be an excuse to get out of town and pamper yourself, you know, the thoughts of lying on a beautiful beach, or sitting in a chaise lounge reading a book while drinking something with an umbrella in it… If you are still hazy about this, merely watch some TV, the tube is rife with this sort of imagery.
Travel, can be a quite different experience. You learn, whether you want to, what it is like for others in different situations. You undergo bouts of depression and anxiety. Travel can be fatiguing, your sleep patterns may be wrung inside out, and you may be impelled to eat things you might not have wanted to before you traveled.
Travel might best be characterized by the Zen koan: ‘before you study Zen, mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers. When you study Zen, mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. And when you have gone past this point in the study of Zen, mountains are once again mountains and rivers are once again rivers.’
Travel (if done well) stretches you; it can educate you, and change how you see things.
The idea of ‘seeing things’ differently is something which many travelers should cultivate. As I talked about in yesterday’s post, there are many (quite evident, after the fact) kinds of experience which are of far deeper value than we usually give them. Traveling can allow us to have a more refined sense of sympathy and empathy for others.
Unfortunately this doesn’t always work.
There are many places and times where I have had the misfortune to deal with fellow travelers who must have mistakenly presumed that they were on vacation. The world weariness I see in many twenty-something travelers is quite dismaying. If you think about it, this sort of attitude, when confronted with almost anything new is akin to someone trying not to enjoy, or ‘get into’ a movie (i.e. willing suspension of disbelief). It strikes me as merely wasted money to go through life this way. It is considered hip, though…
Back in my world of the unhip, I can see many practical advantages in cultivating a sense naïveté when traveling. It is certainly, a much more effective means with which to gain friendships. And looking at a ‘new world’ with the eyes of a four year old has some advantages too!
For this reason, I have come up with an idea.
I have read literally hundreds of travel blogs (sigh), most of which are written by the world weary. After a while I start to wonder what the point is in these interminable essays… Because another (deeper) aspect of travel is that after visiting enough different places…you see the profound similarities, versus the superficial parts of locations. For instance, I wonder how many more travel blogs need to describe the beaches in Phuket, or how ‘funky’ Prague is for twenty-something’s…
Since travel can be mostly about your own perceptions (at least in my definition), I have decided to try to write some ‘travel blog’ entries about some of the ‘small places’ here in Northern Minnesota, in my general environs. My point is that the ‘unexpected’ can be found almost anywhere you take the time to look
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