reconceptualizing travel

The end of the pandemic is the opening up of travel for me, which has been a pretty amazing time.

Enjoyed nearly a week in Boston exploring the art and food of the city, and thinking quite a bit about the privilege of travel. I’m lucky to be able to take trips, see people, and have experiences to think and write about.

The thing about travel is it always creates more demand for itself. The trip is upcoming – it happens in your mind as a fantasy or a prediction. The trip begins. You can’t wait to get there. You experience the going as anticipation of arrival. You have the trip. You imagine yourself remembering the fantastic moments while living them. You compare your experiences to your predictive fantasy. You are going home. You wonder about the trip and remember it as you miss the trip home again. At home, you wonder where the trip took place, when it happened, what counts, and what was left out/behind.

Travel has taken on a powerful meaning of freedom and ability for me, along with joy and gratitude. For a very long time travel was a part of my teaching. I took students all around the world. It was a great time doing that, but it was always coupled with anxiety and concern about their safety, experience, and other things that could go wrong. I didn’t really like travelling as such during that time because it was pretty exhausting.

Now I can’t imagine feeling that way and I’m somewhat embarrassed that I would look forward to the end of trips sometimes. I think it might have just been the stress of responsibility or care for others, both physically and psychologically. I think I’d be better at it today.

Rhetoric teaches us that meanings often come from what we preconceive of being there in the thing or the moment as we encounter it. We look for what we assume to be there and then confirm its presence. Travel is no different. It’s hard for me to imagine what meanings I used to easily find in travel. Now it’s very easy to see it as something really special. The trick is to understand that whatever you look for you’ll find it – it wasn’t really there at all, you brought it in yourself.

The most well-known version of this idea comes from the film The Empire Strikes Back where Luke enters the cave, fights Darth Vader, decapitates him and realizes he’s decapitated himself. The better version of this is the Ox Herding Woodcuts, carved around 15th c. Korea and detail the story of a young man going into the woods to find and tame an ox. He learns from this experience that there was no ox, just himself there, and he tamed his own mind.

My friend tells me of a stolen Buddhist temple bell that is in a park somewhere in Boston. We seek after it, like the ox, and have the conversation about the ox herding pictures. We look up after some walking, and see the ox. We then took photos with it. The question then becomes: What did we take pictures of or with? It seems clear I took a photo here of my conceptions that I brought with me on the hunt for the bell. Or ox. Or whatever I thought was out there.

Maybe this ancient story of the ox is a good way to keep preconceptions where they should be – on our minds, from our minds – not received from out in the world (where we most likely put them). This might be a good way to keep travel where it should be – a conception that can and should change before it becomes anything else.