The Nature of Travel
13th February 2011
The nature of travelling does not dictate as such, but it stipulates in unspoken form of continuity. Moving forward, carrying onwards, passing through, and even lingering on, they all really amount to the same…
There are many choices behind the need to embark on uncertain journeys, whether it be as means of escape from life’s mundanity; the hope of finding what you thought you had lost along the way; the chance to be the spontaneous person you never were; the present threat of lifelong regret; the time and space to nurse those smarting wounds…always there is an ever present reason just under the surface, whether you realise it at first, or not.
And the appeal of all of this is as clear as day. A traveller can immediately throw off their daily mantle and step temporarily into complete anonymity. That you worked as a doctor, bus driver, lawyer, or never had a job in your life. There is no distinction, and it is precisely that. What you were. Origins are all well and good, but in the ideology of travel, once you have stepped out and away, what you become, and what you discover along the way, is much more important than who you were to begin with.
An inspiring man once said that we should never get frustrated when we feel life isn’t moving fast enough for us, that others are somehow holding us back and we haven´t attained our personal goals in record time. It may be in these moments, when we are forced to halt in our tracks by those obstacles we have no power over, when we are delayed and lose some of that control we love to grasp hold of. It is in these unexpected and spontaneous circumstances that our paths just may cross with the most unusual people. Personalities who arrest our attention, characters who can challenge our own, individuals who influence us so much that they may even change the direction we will move in. Be prepared for diversions, for indeed life is full of them. Travelling only seems to heighten our awareness of those moments, and intensify them.
If you meet only one stranger who somersaults your expectations, upturning your world or the way you thought of yourself, you will have experienced that rush of the traveller. It is nothing so out of the ordinary, so unique to the traveller lifestyle alone, for essentially it is just life itself compacted, melted down and purified into the tiniest of segments. One such segment can last an hour, a week, 3 months perhaps, and if you are very lucky it could expand into a lifetime of its own.
Whatever its duration, it only takes one. One life segment can breathe into you a moment of joy, peace, and most importantly, pure abandonment. Some may call it carefree, but I see nothing more freeing than discarding some of that weight we may have forgotten is pressing on our shoulders. The past, the sadness, the brokenness, of ourselves and our relationships, and finding and connecting in complete and honest abandonment. After all, isn’t that what we really hope to find at the end of the road…?
Rx
