My 2010 travels are old news now, but I felt that some sort of wrap-up was in order because this trip was a bigger experience than just the individual stories I’ve managed to post on this blog. I usually do not do a very good job of articulating why I like traveling the way I do. Some people get it and some people don’t. Either way, I hope this entry is interesting for you to read. It’s always an evolving thought process.
Also, I went through my photos and picked out a few that were skipped over the first time around.
A lot of people have asked me about my favorite country or favorite place. It’s a good, open-ended question. But every time someone asks me this, I find myself stammering about how each place has it’s good and bad aspects. I realize this is a boring answer. I know that most people just want to hear about a cool place or just want to give me a platform to share a quick experience. It’s not a trick question, but it always feels like one.
I’ve come to think of places as just extensions of people, and so inherent the all the complexities of people. Like people, I can easily evaluate my first impression of a place and pick one over the other, but first impressions can be misleading. It takes time to figure that out. To idealize a place is to misunderstand it. Traveling is more akin to interviewing a person that it is being best friends with them. They don’t have to be like-able in order to be interesting and I’m not convinced that one trait is better than the other. Virtues can be more charming because there are faults, not despite them.
So if picking a favorite place is too hard, what about a favorite experience? It’s also a difficult question. My favorite travel experiences are not the iconic events found in travel brochures. Visiting the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, or Angkor Wat have been very special experiences, and they are easy to talk about because everyone knows about them, but they are not my favorite. I suppose I’ve accumulated a fair number of travel stories over the years, stories of adversity, adventure or embarrassment. Typically, the more miserable the experience, the more fondly I remember it. Again, these experiences are special, but still not my favorite.
My favorite moments of travel are these brief moments, which are almost incidental to the journey itself, when I have the ability to really appreciate where I am in the world. They are usually so small that it’s almost a non-event.
I have this memory, for example, of being on the train in Mongolia. It was late into the night. The deep groaning of the wheels against the track kept me awake, but seemed to have lulled everyone else to sleep. Across from me, a 12 year old girl was slowly being inched off the bench she shared with her sleeping brother. I smiled when she hit him, but failed to rouse a response. Frustrated with her brother, she came over and sat next to me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn she spoke some English. She was disappointed that I did not speak Mongolian and so persistently quizzed me on a few basic phrases. Entertained with herself, she sang a dozen hits off the Top 40, keeping her voice below the dull roar of the train. I stuck my head out the window and tried focusing on the black nothingness, amazed at where I was.
I have many of these memories. In Morocco, I slept on a warm concrete roof as music and people crowded the street below. In Bolivia, I sat alone in the jungle, under a full moon. In the Philippines, I lost myself in the ocean. In Chile, fought the wind. In Korea, I drank Soju with strangers.
These moments of appreciation hardly seem worth mentioning without making the effort to explain that they are special not because of where I was, but because I was able to appreciate it. There are easily more places and experiences that I did not appreciate. These moments cannot be forced or planned, they are a by-product of making myself available to the world. They are the experiences that make me want to keep traveling.
I may have evaded the questions about my favorite place and experience, but I do have an answer for why I like long-term travel, not that anyone is asking. I think the process of travel is the process of learning to live. It is the possibility that all things can be better.
There is a homogeny across America that enables you to travel 2000 miles and still eat at all the same restaurants that you enjoy at home, while talking to all of your same friends and keeping all of your same habits. We naturally establish precedents in our decision-making process, and then rely on those precedents to get us through the day. It gets us in and out of the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time. Traveling wipes out these precedents. What to eat, where to sleep, what to do, who to meet, all these answers need to be re-invented. And unlike reinventing these precedents at home, which tends to happen gradually and with much effort, traveling does me the favor of riping the band-aid off in one quick motion.
So why is re-inventing everything such a good thing? Because I, like most people, fall easily into habits and gradually stop making active decisions about life. I would guess that most people live in close proximity to a restaurant they’ve never tried. Not because it looks like a bad place, but because they’ve gotten in the habit of not going there. Traveling exercises the muscle of decision-making. Opinions are awoken. The process of re-invention, of living something new, creates some breathing room to reconsider our closely held precedents.
Traveling also strips me of obligation. I’m sure this sounds painfully obvious. No job, no responsibility, no problem! However, even if traveling is just a vacation from “real” life, which dictates that I work and be responsible, it’s also a vacation from stuff.
Yes, all of my stuff. It’s true, we Americans spend an enormous amount of time and effort in the acquiring, caring for, and the disposing of stuff. Taking care of our houses, cars, computers and clothes is a never-ending job. And it seems to be an inevitable fact of life. But it’s not. And while we may be one of the wealthiest, stuff-laden societies in all of human history, this struggle is not new.
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to Waldon pond, outside of Concord, Massachusetts, to live as simply as he possibly could. He lived this way for two years.
Although he lived in the most rudimentary way, he was comfortable enough, and for the most part, did very little work.
Concerning housework, he had this to say:
Of course, this was in 1845, back when people lived in simpler times. But that’s also not true. I’ve recently read Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, where he details, amongst other things, the average life of an English servant during the same time period Thoreau was living in the woods, soaking up sunshine.
In this context it is a little easier to see why Thoreau thought a simple mat was the beginning of evil. Hyperbole aside, the point that we are in conflict with our possessions is a valid one.
Possessions tend to get in the way between our professed values and how we actually spend our time. There’s nothing wrong with owning a basketball if you love to play basketball. But it is a stretch to claim that our most time consuming possessions assist us in proportion to achieving our life-goals. The owners of large houses have probably not aspired to be prolific house-cleaners, but that what many of them end up being. We are happily distracted.
Traveling eliminates this conflict. Sitting in a bare, cramped hostel, with only my backpack to look at, forces me to get out and experience something other than the solitary walls staring back. It’s true that traveling this way forces me to give up certain comforts, but I get something more valuable in exchange. I get a single, focused obligation: make the most of the present situation. It feels like time is finally on my side.
Living this way reminds me that the choice between an experience and a possession is not even worth debating, tempting as it is. I found that being away from my stuff made me want it less, not more. Putting a few things into a bag and closing the door behind me is a good reminder that everything else could burn to the ground and I’d still be OK.
The backpack teaches another important lesson: the cost of ownership. It can be tempting to buy up locally produced goods. However, the value of such an item is seldom worth the effort of carrying it around. If hypothetically, someone offered me the job of carrying around extra stuff in my backpack, it would have to be an impracticably high rate. Outside of the most basic, utilitarian items, the cost of ownership is almost always non-trivial. I suspect that some people avoid moving, or traveling altogether because of the stress associated with managing their stuff. As Thoreau said, it is the beginning of evil.
Even travelers with very expensive gear tend to enjoy themselves a lot less than those of us who don’t. They obligate themselves to their stuff. And while I do carry some expensive electronics, I don’t carry anything that I’m not willing lose. Nice things should make our lives better, not complicate them.
I’ve been talking about being stripped of precedent and obligation as way to recalibrate all those personal decisions that add up to a day’s worth of activity. It is empowering to make so many active decisions. However, I’ve come to realize that even these decisions are not my own. I guess you could say that my worldview has shifted. It’s interesting to me that this should happen now, as I can’t attribute it to the novelty of being in a new culture as I’m only slightly more “well-traveled” now than I was a year ago. Prior to this trip, I had been to 20-some countries on 5 continents.
Nonetheless, the more I learn, the more I’m convinced and humbled by the fact that most decisions, by most people are determined by a force of convenience. I don’t mean to say that given two choices, between the quick way and the right way, people will always choose the quick way. I mean, that given two choices, a hundred other choices go unacknowledged. These are the culturally-inconvenient possibilities.
In western culture, a billion people have settled on the question of what a toilet should look like. It’s the same design across all classes of people. But in Asia, a billion people have decided that the toilet should be something different, that squatting is superior to sitting. Is it because each half of the world has weighed the pros and cons of each design and come to a unanimous agreement on which is better? Of course not. It’s because when it’s time to install a toilet, the selection at Home Depot is relegated to a single paradigm of what a toilet should be. What is interesting is not that one group of people might prefer one over the other, but for the 300 million people in the U.S., squat toilets don’t even exist. For a culture that thrives on making passionate arguments over the trivialities in technology or sports, it’s astonishing that we all agree on something as personal as a toilet. My point of course is that we don’t consciously agree, we simply don’t think about it.
So what’s the big deal? Failing to recognize the role that inertia, or convenience, plays in our decision-making process puts artificial limits on improving our place in the world. While I was thinking about this, I ran across this blurb from At Home: A Short History of Private Life:
Two thousand years is a long time to be using an inferior plow. It’s a mistake to think that we humans are over this hump of ignorance that ignores the achievements of other cultures.
I’ve come home with my own set of random cultural grievances. I’m all of sudden frustrated with the design of single family homes, which have barely changed in the last 150 years. I can’t understand why roofs are not made into patio space.
I’m also frustrated with how our communities are laid out and how being car-friendly has been made at the expense of pedestrian-friendly. I live in a relatively urbanized area, and still, everything seems so. far. apart. It’s not good for our health, our environment, or our economy. It got me wondering about automobile ownership. I was not surprised to learn that we lead the world in car ownership, by a lot. Per capita, we own almost twice as many cars as the English.
Of course it is difficult to imagine getting along in the U.S. without a car, unless you live in one of the few areas that have adequate public transportation. It’s important to recognize that this is a necessity put on us by cultural inertia. The vast majority of American residences are artificially separated from consumer facilities, which in turn are separated by giant parking lots. As an arbitrary comparison, per capita, we own 27 times more cars than the Filipinos. It’s an apples and oranges, I know, but it’s a fallacy to believe that our system is 27 times more convenient, 27 times better for our well-being.
So I may park in the front row and save 3 minutes of time, or deliberately park in the back row and get an extra 3 minutes of exercise. Either way, my choices are dominated by the cultural inertia that requires me to drive in the first place. It ignores the fact that most people in the world live in a community where walking is simply more practical than it is in the U.S.
In researching Korea, I noticed that Koreans work almost twice as many hours as the Dutch (top of the chart vs the bottom). In economic terms, it is not fair to directly compare these two countries. A better comparison are the people of Singapore, who work just as much as Koreans, and are more wealthy than the Dutch. It is cultural inertia, not the need for wealth, that determines how many hours are appropriate to work. Heck, the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari (known for their “clicking” language) have a 6 hour work day and only work 2.5 days per week.
I’m not arguing that we would all be better off loafing around the Kalahari. Long working hours suit some people and short working hours suit other people. What is curious to me is that culture should play such a dominant role, squeezing populations of people into wildly different, but equally narrow distribution curves.
I guess the bigger point I’m trying to make is that it is easy to forget that everything that we consider to be normal, is mostly arbitrary. Traveling is the best way for me to be reminded of that. It is both empowering and frustrating. We are creatures of habit. We fall into the roles expected of the environment.
Again, from Waldon:
Louis C.K., a self-deprecating stand-up comic, has an interesting bit about his own inherent evilness. Here’s the clip and partial transcript:
What I like about this clip is the acknowledgment that we live to an arbitrary set of standards. If you can afford an Infinity, you should drive an Infinity. Even though there is an infinite number of ways to allocate the money needed to buy his car, it’s easier to allow the force of cultural convenience to make that decision.
If you’ve followed my train of thought, you’ll notice that I’ve claimed that traveling illuminates a world of possibility while also claiming that culture deterministically drives our decisions down a very narrow avenue. I would like to think that travel makes that road just a little bit wider.
I remember a conversation I had with my driver in the mountains of western Mongolia. He was a high school teacher in his 40’s, working as a driver for the summer. He has spent his whole life in that isolated corner of the world and dreams of visiting the pyramids in Egypt. He confessed that even if he saved every penny of his income, he would never be able to afford such a trip.
Neil Peart, musician, writer, traveler, and personal hero of mine wrote this in his blog a few months back. He will be 60 next year and has toured regularly for over 30 years.
I really love traveling, so it doesn’t say much that I would make some small sacrifices to do it. But I still feel a sense of obligation to travel - because I can. There are people in the world who will save for a lifetime, and never make it to the pyramids. I don’t want to be someone who drives an Infinity without giving it a second thought.
Since I’ve quoted from Waldon so much already, it would be a shame not to include this:
In many ways, traveling is one of the best things I can do for myself. I always learn valuable lessons, make wonderful memories and meet wonderful people. And while traveling can sometimes be difficult, stressful, tiring, lonely, it is also living the life of a lazy, narcissistic brat. It is a luxury. I get that.
Also, I went through my photos and picked out a few that were skipped over the first time around.
 |
| From Leftovers |
A lot of people have asked me about my favorite country or favorite place. It’s a good, open-ended question. But every time someone asks me this, I find myself stammering about how each place has it’s good and bad aspects. I realize this is a boring answer. I know that most people just want to hear about a cool place or just want to give me a platform to share a quick experience. It’s not a trick question, but it always feels like one.
I’ve come to think of places as just extensions of people, and so inherent the all the complexities of people. Like people, I can easily evaluate my first impression of a place and pick one over the other, but first impressions can be misleading. It takes time to figure that out. To idealize a place is to misunderstand it. Traveling is more akin to interviewing a person that it is being best friends with them. They don’t have to be like-able in order to be interesting and I’m not convinced that one trait is better than the other. Virtues can be more charming because there are faults, not despite them.
So if picking a favorite place is too hard, what about a favorite experience? It’s also a difficult question. My favorite travel experiences are not the iconic events found in travel brochures. Visiting the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, or Angkor Wat have been very special experiences, and they are easy to talk about because everyone knows about them, but they are not my favorite. I suppose I’ve accumulated a fair number of travel stories over the years, stories of adversity, adventure or embarrassment. Typically, the more miserable the experience, the more fondly I remember it. Again, these experiences are special, but still not my favorite.
My favorite moments of travel are these brief moments, which are almost incidental to the journey itself, when I have the ability to really appreciate where I am in the world. They are usually so small that it’s almost a non-event.
I have this memory, for example, of being on the train in Mongolia. It was late into the night. The deep groaning of the wheels against the track kept me awake, but seemed to have lulled everyone else to sleep. Across from me, a 12 year old girl was slowly being inched off the bench she shared with her sleeping brother. I smiled when she hit him, but failed to rouse a response. Frustrated with her brother, she came over and sat next to me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn she spoke some English. She was disappointed that I did not speak Mongolian and so persistently quizzed me on a few basic phrases. Entertained with herself, she sang a dozen hits off the Top 40, keeping her voice below the dull roar of the train. I stuck my head out the window and tried focusing on the black nothingness, amazed at where I was.
I have many of these memories. In Morocco, I slept on a warm concrete roof as music and people crowded the street below. In Bolivia, I sat alone in the jungle, under a full moon. In the Philippines, I lost myself in the ocean. In Chile, fought the wind. In Korea, I drank Soju with strangers.
These moments of appreciation hardly seem worth mentioning without making the effort to explain that they are special not because of where I was, but because I was able to appreciate it. There are easily more places and experiences that I did not appreciate. These moments cannot be forced or planned, they are a by-product of making myself available to the world. They are the experiences that make me want to keep traveling.
 |
| From Leftovers |
I may have evaded the questions about my favorite place and experience, but I do have an answer for why I like long-term travel, not that anyone is asking. I think the process of travel is the process of learning to live. It is the possibility that all things can be better.
There is a homogeny across America that enables you to travel 2000 miles and still eat at all the same restaurants that you enjoy at home, while talking to all of your same friends and keeping all of your same habits. We naturally establish precedents in our decision-making process, and then rely on those precedents to get us through the day. It gets us in and out of the grocery store in a reasonable amount of time. Traveling wipes out these precedents. What to eat, where to sleep, what to do, who to meet, all these answers need to be re-invented. And unlike reinventing these precedents at home, which tends to happen gradually and with much effort, traveling does me the favor of riping the band-aid off in one quick motion.
So why is re-inventing everything such a good thing? Because I, like most people, fall easily into habits and gradually stop making active decisions about life. I would guess that most people live in close proximity to a restaurant they’ve never tried. Not because it looks like a bad place, but because they’ve gotten in the habit of not going there. Traveling exercises the muscle of decision-making. Opinions are awoken. The process of re-invention, of living something new, creates some breathing room to reconsider our closely held precedents.
 |
| From Leftovers |
Traveling also strips me of obligation. I’m sure this sounds painfully obvious. No job, no responsibility, no problem! However, even if traveling is just a vacation from “real” life, which dictates that I work and be responsible, it’s also a vacation from stuff.
Yes, all of my stuff. It’s true, we Americans spend an enormous amount of time and effort in the acquiring, caring for, and the disposing of stuff. Taking care of our houses, cars, computers and clothes is a never-ending job. And it seems to be an inevitable fact of life. But it’s not. And while we may be one of the wealthiest, stuff-laden societies in all of human history, this struggle is not new.
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to Waldon pond, outside of Concord, Massachusetts, to live as simply as he possibly could. He lived this way for two years.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Although he lived in the most rudimentary way, he was comfortable enough, and for the most part, did very little work.
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.
Concerning housework, he had this to say:
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet; and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
Of course, this was in 1845, back when people lived in simpler times. But that’s also not true. I’ve recently read Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, where he details, amongst other things, the average life of an English servant during the same time period Thoreau was living in the woods, soaking up sunshine.
…the lot of the servant was to spend seventeen hours a day “drudging in and out of the kitchen, running upstairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water, or down on your knees before a grate....”
Furniture, fire grates, drapes, mirrors, windows, marble, brass, glass, and silver—all had to be cleaned and polished regularly, usually with their own particular brand of homemade polish. To keep steel knives and forks gleaming, it wasn’t enough to wash and polish them; they had to be vigorously stropped against a piece of leather on which had been smeared a paste of emery powder, chalk, brick dust, crocus, or hartshorn liberally mixed with lard. Before being put away, knives were greased with mutton fat (to defeat rusting) and wrapped in brown paper, and so had to be unwrapped, washed, and dried before they could be used again.
In this context it is a little easier to see why Thoreau thought a simple mat was the beginning of evil. Hyperbole aside, the point that we are in conflict with our possessions is a valid one.
Possessions tend to get in the way between our professed values and how we actually spend our time. There’s nothing wrong with owning a basketball if you love to play basketball. But it is a stretch to claim that our most time consuming possessions assist us in proportion to achieving our life-goals. The owners of large houses have probably not aspired to be prolific house-cleaners, but that what many of them end up being. We are happily distracted.
Traveling eliminates this conflict. Sitting in a bare, cramped hostel, with only my backpack to look at, forces me to get out and experience something other than the solitary walls staring back. It’s true that traveling this way forces me to give up certain comforts, but I get something more valuable in exchange. I get a single, focused obligation: make the most of the present situation. It feels like time is finally on my side.
Living this way reminds me that the choice between an experience and a possession is not even worth debating, tempting as it is. I found that being away from my stuff made me want it less, not more. Putting a few things into a bag and closing the door behind me is a good reminder that everything else could burn to the ground and I’d still be OK.
The backpack teaches another important lesson: the cost of ownership. It can be tempting to buy up locally produced goods. However, the value of such an item is seldom worth the effort of carrying it around. If hypothetically, someone offered me the job of carrying around extra stuff in my backpack, it would have to be an impracticably high rate. Outside of the most basic, utilitarian items, the cost of ownership is almost always non-trivial. I suspect that some people avoid moving, or traveling altogether because of the stress associated with managing their stuff. As Thoreau said, it is the beginning of evil.
Even travelers with very expensive gear tend to enjoy themselves a lot less than those of us who don’t. They obligate themselves to their stuff. And while I do carry some expensive electronics, I don’t carry anything that I’m not willing lose. Nice things should make our lives better, not complicate them.
 |
| From Leftovers |
I’ve been talking about being stripped of precedent and obligation as way to recalibrate all those personal decisions that add up to a day’s worth of activity. It is empowering to make so many active decisions. However, I’ve come to realize that even these decisions are not my own. I guess you could say that my worldview has shifted. It’s interesting to me that this should happen now, as I can’t attribute it to the novelty of being in a new culture as I’m only slightly more “well-traveled” now than I was a year ago. Prior to this trip, I had been to 20-some countries on 5 continents.
Nonetheless, the more I learn, the more I’m convinced and humbled by the fact that most decisions, by most people are determined by a force of convenience. I don’t mean to say that given two choices, between the quick way and the right way, people will always choose the quick way. I mean, that given two choices, a hundred other choices go unacknowledged. These are the culturally-inconvenient possibilities.
 |
| From Leftovers |
In western culture, a billion people have settled on the question of what a toilet should look like. It’s the same design across all classes of people. But in Asia, a billion people have decided that the toilet should be something different, that squatting is superior to sitting. Is it because each half of the world has weighed the pros and cons of each design and come to a unanimous agreement on which is better? Of course not. It’s because when it’s time to install a toilet, the selection at Home Depot is relegated to a single paradigm of what a toilet should be. What is interesting is not that one group of people might prefer one over the other, but for the 300 million people in the U.S., squat toilets don’t even exist. For a culture that thrives on making passionate arguments over the trivialities in technology or sports, it’s astonishing that we all agree on something as personal as a toilet. My point of course is that we don’t consciously agree, we simply don’t think about it.
So what’s the big deal? Failing to recognize the role that inertia, or convenience, plays in our decision-making process puts artificial limits on improving our place in the world. While I was thinking about this, I ran across this blurb from At Home: A Short History of Private Life:
People had been living with domesticated animals for 4,000 years before it occurred to anyone to put the bigger of them to work pulling plows; Westerners used a clumsy, heavy, exceedingly inefficient straight-bladed plow for a further 2,000 years before someone introduced them to the simple curved plow the Chinese had been using since time immemorial.
Two thousand years is a long time to be using an inferior plow. It’s a mistake to think that we humans are over this hump of ignorance that ignores the achievements of other cultures.
 |
| From Leftovers |
I’ve come home with my own set of random cultural grievances. I’m all of sudden frustrated with the design of single family homes, which have barely changed in the last 150 years. I can’t understand why roofs are not made into patio space.
I’m also frustrated with how our communities are laid out and how being car-friendly has been made at the expense of pedestrian-friendly. I live in a relatively urbanized area, and still, everything seems so. far. apart. It’s not good for our health, our environment, or our economy. It got me wondering about automobile ownership. I was not surprised to learn that we lead the world in car ownership, by a lot. Per capita, we own almost twice as many cars as the English.
Of course it is difficult to imagine getting along in the U.S. without a car, unless you live in one of the few areas that have adequate public transportation. It’s important to recognize that this is a necessity put on us by cultural inertia. The vast majority of American residences are artificially separated from consumer facilities, which in turn are separated by giant parking lots. As an arbitrary comparison, per capita, we own 27 times more cars than the Filipinos. It’s an apples and oranges, I know, but it’s a fallacy to believe that our system is 27 times more convenient, 27 times better for our well-being.
So I may park in the front row and save 3 minutes of time, or deliberately park in the back row and get an extra 3 minutes of exercise. Either way, my choices are dominated by the cultural inertia that requires me to drive in the first place. It ignores the fact that most people in the world live in a community where walking is simply more practical than it is in the U.S.
In researching Korea, I noticed that Koreans work almost twice as many hours as the Dutch (top of the chart vs the bottom). In economic terms, it is not fair to directly compare these two countries. A better comparison are the people of Singapore, who work just as much as Koreans, and are more wealthy than the Dutch. It is cultural inertia, not the need for wealth, that determines how many hours are appropriate to work. Heck, the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari (known for their “clicking” language) have a 6 hour work day and only work 2.5 days per week.
I’m not arguing that we would all be better off loafing around the Kalahari. Long working hours suit some people and short working hours suit other people. What is curious to me is that culture should play such a dominant role, squeezing populations of people into wildly different, but equally narrow distribution curves.
I guess the bigger point I’m trying to make is that it is easy to forget that everything that we consider to be normal, is mostly arbitrary. Traveling is the best way for me to be reminded of that. It is both empowering and frustrating. We are creatures of habit. We fall into the roles expected of the environment.
Again, from Waldon:
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
 |
| From Leftovers |
Louis C.K., a self-deprecating stand-up comic, has an interesting bit about his own inherent evilness. Here’s the clip and partial transcript:
There are people who just starve to death, that's all they ever did. there are people who are born and they're like "Oh I’'m hungry" and then they just die....and that's all they ever got to do.
…....It's totally my fault cause I could trade my Infinity in for a really good car, a nice Ford Focus with no miles on it and I'd get back like $20,000 and I could save hundreds of people from dying from starvation with that money. And every day I don’t do it. Every day I make them die with my car.
What I like about this clip is the acknowledgment that we live to an arbitrary set of standards. If you can afford an Infinity, you should drive an Infinity. Even though there is an infinite number of ways to allocate the money needed to buy his car, it’s easier to allow the force of cultural convenience to make that decision.
If you’ve followed my train of thought, you’ll notice that I’ve claimed that traveling illuminates a world of possibility while also claiming that culture deterministically drives our decisions down a very narrow avenue. I would like to think that travel makes that road just a little bit wider.
 |
| From Leftovers |
I remember a conversation I had with my driver in the mountains of western Mongolia. He was a high school teacher in his 40’s, working as a driver for the summer. He has spent his whole life in that isolated corner of the world and dreams of visiting the pyramids in Egypt. He confessed that even if he saved every penny of his income, he would never be able to afford such a trip.
Neil Peart, musician, writer, traveler, and personal hero of mine wrote this in his blog a few months back. He will be 60 next year and has toured regularly for over 30 years.
Just before setting off on a concert tour, I am often perplexed when friends at home ask, “Are you
excited to be going on tour?” Of course a deeply ingrained fantasy is at work there, and to answer in the negative seems jaded, cynical, wrong. However, to put their question another way—should I be excited to be leaving my wife, my ten-month-old daughter, my home,my kitchen, my desk, my books, my pleasures and treasures, my toys and joys?
Another client that Michael works with, Elliot Mintz, is a veteran public relations man, going back
to the time of the Beatles, and these days he represents the surviving members of John Lennon’s family, Bob Dylan, and other celebrities. A diminutive, nattily-dressed man, he attended one of our shows at the Hollywood Bowl a few years back, and I spoke with him after. I was telling him that I didn’t really like touring, but somehow felt it was something I had to do—if you call yourself a musician, it is kind of your duty to play live.
He nodded, looked up at me with a serious expression, and said, “You have to do it—because you can.”
That simple phrase stayed with me for a long time after, as I wrestled with its implications. Recently I shared Elliot’s insight with Geddy, at dinner in the dressing room before a show, and he nodded and said that statement expressed the reality about as well as he’d ever heard.
I really love traveling, so it doesn’t say much that I would make some small sacrifices to do it. But I still feel a sense of obligation to travel - because I can. There are people in the world who will save for a lifetime, and never make it to the pyramids. I don’t want to be someone who drives an Infinity without giving it a second thought.
Since I’ve quoted from Waldon so much already, it would be a shame not to include this:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
In many ways, traveling is one of the best things I can do for myself. I always learn valuable lessons, make wonderful memories and meet wonderful people. And while traveling can sometimes be difficult, stressful, tiring, lonely, it is also living the life of a lazy, narcissistic brat. It is a luxury. I get that.
 |
| From Blog holder |
Posts
