Meditations

It is natural, when one does something for a long period of time, to begin to question why the thing is being done. And so we have today's question: Why do we travel??

Well, one reason is certainly the Stuff. We all love stuff, even those of us who deny it. "See, I shop at thrift stores," is something you will routinely hear these people say, but this does not mean that they do not love stuff. We go to great pains to cart a bunch of stuff to our destinations, we spend hours searching for a suitable container for all of our stuff, and the first thing we say upon our return is, "Hey, look at all the stuff I got!" So, stuff is of course a great motivator.

But stuff cannot be the only reason. After all, it costs thousands of dollars and hours of vacation time, not to mention the headaches and the bug bites and the sweat and tears and public restrooms that travel naturally entails. With the advent of google images, travel channels, and the perpetually increasing amount of stuff you can buy in the United States (glasses windshield wipers being one example of the awesome variety), international travel falls more and more readily within the scope of our desktops and homes. We can visit Stonehenge, the Great Wall, Easter Island, all from the confines of our airconditioned homes, where we avoid the rain, the exorbitant expense, the queues, the sheer general discomfort, inconvenience, and embarrassment of being a foreigner.

Yet we still travel. Why? What is it that pushes us out of our neighborhoods, across oceans, into heat and crowded trains and breakfastless hostels?

I suppose for most of us it is about seeing something different, being somewhere new. This is not such a profound observation. Everyone loves to "discover" things. "Look what I discovered!" people will exclaim about things that have withstood millions of tourists and thousands of years. Tourists are always eager to note the differences. We make huge lists and pride ourselves on the addition of each new item. "In Munich, the traffic lights go green-yellow-red AND red-yellow-green," we might announce importantly, upon our return, and our audience will nod, awed. "Wow," they might say. "That's so different." Needless to say, from then on, you are the Germany Expert. Everyone defers to you, because, well, you've actually Been There, even it was for two days only. There, they do this, over there, they do that-we reduce countries to bullet points of differences. After all, we have to be ready to answer that inevitable question when we come home: "What was it like?"

Travel is one of those things that is sometimes best in retrospect. After all, it is not the actual act of traveling that most of us love, but the arriving. We do not miss the smelly stations, the crabby ticket masters, the rickety metros that screech like banshees along questionable rails. It is not even (for the most part) the moments we stood outside something famous, squished among throngs of people, thinking to ourselves, "Boy, I am standing outside something famous." Rather, the moment we remember sometimes surprise us-buying stamps at a post office, wading among trout in deliciously cool lakes at the foot of mountains so high they seem ghostly and nebulous at their peaks. Punting in circles. Eating breakfast in Prague and singing to Dido, singing the Barbie song in a Czech bar. Speeding past several countrysides with the wind rushing through the windows and lifting your hair. Memory streams out the bad and enhances the good. Prehaps, then, we travel to remember, to have something to tell, to prove to ourselves that we were up to the challenge.

Me, I take out a map every so often, jab my pen at the mass that is Europe, and marvel that I am an ocean away from home. I am here, and everyone else is there. How incredible that such an unbelievable thing can be, in a way, so insignificant. Imagine a movie, a camera panning your face, and then your upper body, and then the top of your head, and then the tops of the heads of hte people around you. Within four frames you are already lost.

Every day we see thousands of people we will probably never see again. We will lead thousands of lives, none of which will ever cross again. Yet at a single moment, say, 1:55 pm in Barcelona, we all chose ot be on the same Calle. That we can cross oceans. That lava bubbles at the center of the earth and simmers beneath our feet, that massive creatures of the deep lumber slowly in the silent depths of the ocean adn we bob unknowingly above them, thousands of miles from their realms. That they live in their own world, that everyone lives in her own world, that our world holds billions of worlds yet is made up of none of them. How incredible.

When we travel, we return to childhood. Everything is unfamiliar, unknown. We try to contextualize the things we do not know with the things we do. We are adults, after all. We are supposed to Have Information, to be Holders of Knowledge. Travel is hard, but perhaps it is hardest in this way. And this, possibly, is why we ultimately do it-to return to the emotions of our childhood. To once again feel wonder.