ponderings

Today, I felt the first breath of cool air for the first time in two months, and it was glorious.

In celebration of this weather, I took a short walk in the evening, and my mind turned to travel (conditioned by the past few days of scrapbooking photos from Turkey last year… what an endeavor). Travel – what I experienced, how I experience it, why I appreciate it, what are its pitfalls. So for this little post, some musings on travel.

Travel is a luxury, and ultimately that’s why I appreciate it so much. You could go on and on about finding your unknown self in new settings, or learning new ideas and approaches to change the way you think back home, or meeting people you’d never meet otherwise. All of which are well and good, of course, but frankly, I’m not sure if I have learned many, if any, truly profound lessons abroad that I did not already know from home.

What makes travel special, and those moments of insight particularly profound perhaps, is that you have absolutely no obligations to schedules, routines, habits. Instead, you luxuriate in just exploring on your own time, on your own terms. You spend your time seeing things and going places in which you don’t really have much of a stake; in most cases, you can enjoy them without the burden of any personal baggage. Travel gives you an exhilarating, selfish freedom from your normal life.

Of course, there’s a flip side to this, one that I became acutely aware of with the Norway tragedy. I’ve never been to Norway, in fact the only Nordic country I haven’t been to (well, Iceland was only an airport layover, I guess). But I felt a pang nevertheless. Traveling, and living somewhat, in Copenhagen made me develop a stake in the city, a self that’s imprinted in its pavements. By association, I have a connection with Denmark, and by further association, Scandinavia. I was furious that someone had wrecked the Scandinavia I knew and had frozen in memory.

So what am I saying? Travel is freedom, but maybe you’re unaware of the place silently latching on to you with each step you take. After I’ve returned home, I’ll pay more attention to news about Shanghai instead of Seoul, or Thailand instead of Vietnam, or Scandinavia instead of England. Maybe in travel I’m seeking not more freedom, but more connections, more ways to be tied to the global ground.

No Eat, Pray, Love epiphanies here – so far, I have yet to discover my gustatory, spiritual, or romantic self(ves) while on the road. Maybe all I can conclude for now is this: I’ve been so lucky to have been given the freedom of experiencing and subsequently connecting to new places and situations. There may not be very tangible results to show for it, but that’s besides the point. That individual freedom itself is rare, valuable, and addicting.

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