- 17 June 2011
- 5:31pm
- Filed under
Other
The freedom of travel
Mark BroadheadLonely Planet author
Freedom is almost synonymous with movement: fast cars, migrating birds, wind – if it moves, it’s a metaphor for freedom. And so it goes that travel is also associated with freedom and its partner-in-crime, escape. But escape from what?
Image by tinou bao
Travel is an escape from the everyday. The everyday is that which I no longer see, feel, interrogate. Things in my daily life become so common to me that they disappear. The colour of my desk at work I cannot recall, the smell of my shampoo I do not notice, etc. Everything familiar becomes hidden to me. I become numb to the world around me, just as prisoners become numbed by the walls of their cells. My routines are the walls of my cell. To alleviate this daze I purchase new clothes, books, seek out new cafes, take on new hobbies, but these too are quickly absorbed by the everyday.
So how do we get outside of the everyday?
In Christian countries during the Middle Ages, special days (Saints’ days, for example) were marked in the Church Calendar with red ink to distinguish them from normal days (the everyday). As a consequence these celebratory occasions were called Red Letter Days. The last Tuesday before Lent (Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday) was particularly festive, often resulting in roles/rules being reversed: fools becoming lords, lords becoming fools. The freedom from the everyday in these holy days is still visible in the UK, Australasia and Canada where a vacation is called a holiday.
Image by Prefeitura de Olinda
There is still something sacred about travel. Arriving in an unfamiliar culture I find wonderment in everything, from the smallest details to the largest vistas. But it is the festive feeling that dominates. Where at home I found the common things boring and international diplomacy intriguing, while travelling I find politics trivial and the lives of the locals important.
Image by Bohari Adventures
This sense continues for a short period when I return home. Places and people I knew before I left are both familiar and strange. They have become uncanny, or what Freud calls unheimlich (unhomely). It produces a distance between myself and my life. And this is the true freedom of travel. It allows me to interrogate my situation. As Marcel Proust writes: ‘the only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes’.
Further travel philosophy reading: the sublime of travel.
Beautiful post, thank you! It’s exactly what we love about travel and why we have been traveling non-stop as a family for the last 5 years ( to 42 countries on 5 continents on $23/day per person).
And why we have no plans to stop!!
“Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion” – Hunt
I love how it keeps us really living in the “now” and teaches us so much. We feel more alive this way and is also probably the easiest way for us as monolinguals to raise a fluent trilingual/triliterate kiddo ( Mandarin/Spanish/English).
It’s also actually cheaper for us to travel the world as perpetual travelers than to live at home. Reassuring to know my child can feel at home any where and in many languages.
“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes equal distance into the world within.” Lillian Smith
I just wrote this post about nomads by those we met in some isolated mountains in Bhutan, that sparked some similar thoughts.
http://www.soultravelers3.com/2011/06/family-travel-bhutan-nomads.html
Nomad living helps one escape the every day life.
It is always nice to know that there are other people in the world beside me that enjoy the freedom of travel as much as I do.
I wish I could truly give up on the constraints of daily life that I have and free my self from the material things that tie me down.
Unfortuantely I don’t think it will happen soon…my mind however is in a constant state of travel. If I am not on the road or on the air I am plannning to be!
Visit me and my adventures at http://ofmyheart.net
“while travelling I find politics trivial and the lives of the locals important.”
I really appreciate the human connections implied in that statement, and I deeply the value of “making the familiar strange the the strange familiar”.
At the same time, politics is what allows some people the freedom to travel and denies it to others. Hopefully travel can make us more aware of the asymmetry in access to the “freedom of travel”, and of our place in the politics that produce it.
Beautifully written. I just read this quote, “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” by Dagobert D. Runes and it seems so apt.
I think it’s something to do with being out of your comfort zone, that makes you so much more observant and appreciative :) Cheers to everyone traveling everywhere :)
~Shivya
http://theshootingstar.wordpress.com
Twitter: @shivya
Shivya: wonderful quote. Very true.
I really enjoy traveling and interacting with people abroad. A lot of the things you said really summarizes my feelings about travel. Very well written.
Good inspired writing towards describing reason for traveling. http://www.trekkershut.co.in
You’ve hit the nail on the head here. There are so many discussions of what does or doesn’t constitute luxury travel, it’s very hard to pin down. We always try to define it in terms of celebrating life, of a vision in which every moment matters. That’s impossible of course, but when travel is a genuine luxury it often feels like that. Pampering and isolation from the world might just be what you’re after but I feel that a true luxury experience is defined by being unexpected. Whether by exceeding expectations or by completely frustrating them. When we know what we’re going to get where’s the surprise in that. This is the essence of all great stories, and I always feel like the best travel experiences unwind like a kind of triumphant personal narrative. When they’re at their very best.
It’s rare, but then again, isn’t that the point?
Loving your writing Mark.
RS
puttingonthelux.com
Good stuff Mark.