127. REMEMBERING WHERE WE CAME FROM - on the privilege of travel
Over the summer break my wife and I enjoyed a seventeen day road trip around Scotland. In seventeen days we were able to see a lot, but not everything. Edinburgh, for example, Glasgow, Inverness - we ignored these bigger cities completely and focused instead on the wider country, but even here there was much we didn’t see. None of the islands, for example, and wonderful towns at all points east, north, west and south that we simply couldn’t fit into our route. Whenever we decide to travel (humans in general, not just my wife and me) we are always compromising and seeing only a limited portion of wherever we choose to visit. Even if we had stayed for far longer and managed to visit every nook and cranny that Scotland has to offer - every single part of the country - we would have failed to see everything. For whatever happens the day we’re there might not be what happens the day after. Stay for two days instead? A week? Well, who knows what the week after would bring? Or a different season. Visiting is never the same as living somewhere. I might spend a lovely few days in a rented house, a hotel room, a tent, a caravan, etc. and it will still not come close to what it would be to actually live in that same place. I will only ever know the place I visit as a guest, never as a native. When we travel we are only ever getting a glimpse of somewhere. A snapshot, never a complete picture. And there are other limiting factors too. I might be in a particular town to see its tourist attractions, but doing so comes at the expense of getting to know the non-touristy parts. Or vice-versa. My grandmother lived in Manhattan her whole life and we visited her there often. It was only after she died, however, that we really saw all the touristy things in New York like the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty. When she was alive we were there to visit her, not to be tourists. Meanwhile most visitors to the city probably never stepped foot inside my grandmother’s apartment or learnt where to buy groceries or get a prescription filled. In Scotland I have been to Edinburgh many times, but never outside of the festival. I have no idea what Edinburgh is actually like on a quiet Tuesday in October, only the busy hustle and bustle of the Royal Mile during the middle of the Fringe. And while I spent many quiet Tuesdays in October while living in Cardiff for seven years, never once did I visit Cardiff Castle or know what it is like to be a visiting fan in town to see the rugby at the stadium. You are always missing out on something, whether visitor or resident, and it is good to keep that in mind when you attempt to “see” somewhere new. Incompleteness is inevitable.
Some visit the Lake District to walk and to climb, others visit to relax by a lake for a few days and read a pile of books. Some visit Cornwall to relax on the beach, others to go surfing. There is no one way to visit somewhere, and no “right” way to holiday. Ultimately, we must do what makes us happy. After all, that’s why we have paid whatever it cost to get away. Sometimes we might make mistakes and regret doing or not doing something. The road not taken, the sight not seen. But the only way we should judge the success of our time away anywhere is by asking ourselves: did I enjoy it? If the answer is yes, even if all you did was sit inside a hotel room for a week watching TV and sleeping, then the holiday served its function. If you look back on what you did with regret - exhausting yourself to tick all the boxes of seeing every sight in the guidebook when all you really wanted to do was sit inside the hotel room for a week watching TV and sleeping - then, and only then, can you criticise what you did. We do not go on holiday to please others, or impress the world with our photos on social media, we go to get away from our day-to-day lives, have a time out, recharge, recuperate, and experience the world beyond our everyday. Maybe learn something new.
Which, we must remember, is a privilege. As my wife and I discussed what we had managed to do on our Scottish road trip, and what we would like to do in Scotland another time if we came back, we thought of various other holidays we had taken together - to America, to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Ireland, to Italy, to the Netherlands, to France, to Spain - and started thinking about where we might travel next summer. And it occurred to me how historically insane it is to be able to expect that I will see more of the world than is contained within walking distance of where I live. How, in the past, entire lives would be spent never leaving the borders of your village, your town, your country, and how, today, thanks to cars, trains, boats and planes, they actually sell scratch-off maps of the world with the expectation that the buyer will want to keep tabs on every continent they have been to. How there is now an expectation for you to travel rather than it being a rare thing which only a very few people will ever do.
Humans have always been curious, wanted to explore. And, of course, humans have often sought to conquer faraway places as well as visit them - pillage and colonise whole corners of the globe and recreate them in their own image. The desire for some sort of travel has always existed, but it has always been limited by technology and knowledge. Would our boats drop off the edge of the world when we ventured across the horizon? Nowadays we know that they do not, but once that question gave potential travellers great pause. What once would have been impossible journeys reserved only for the bravest of explorers are, today, the stuff of cheap holiday deals and last minute airline bookings. We complain about long queues at airports but forget the airport itself is an historical miracle, albeit a miracle mortgaged on an unsustainable culture of rapacious fossil fuel consumption whose time might be coming to an end. That one shouldn’t spend an entire life within the tiny confines of the small section of the world in which they were born but should want to see beyond their borders is now the expectation rather than the anomaly. As long as you can afford it (and if you can’t, you are encouraged to work to afford it) you should try to see as much of the world as you can.
The idea is not a bad one. We learn so much from getting to know other people, other cultures, other geography and being reminded that our own myopic perspective is usually the product of our limited surroundings rather than anything essential built into the fabric of the world. It is important to be reminded that not everywhere is the same and elsewhere there might be better, or at least different, ways of doing things. Travel definitely broadens the mind, and the more we travel beyond the necessarily restricted parameters of our everyday lives the greater the possibilities for change and transformation we get exposed to. But we must also never forget that this norm of today’s globalised world is something unknown to the majority of humans until the fairly recent advent of mass commercial transport. That, historically, the human instinct to explore has been just as easily satisfied looking at the grass a village over than it has been flying halfway across the world to sit in the sun in a faraway holiday resort that promises all the comforts of home in a marginally more tropical environment.
The human desire to explore and travel is really the human desire to learn. But, historically, it has been that desire combined with a certain lacking and need. We do not have X here so we shall have to seek it out elsewhere. We travelled seeking water, land, crops, minerals and other resources. We travelled seeking ideas, cures, wonders, myths and legends. It made me wonder what it is we travel for today? What is the lack we seek to find? What is the need that makes us leave the comfort of our homes and brave the journeys beyond? And I realised that the advent of commercial transport went hand in hand with the advent of commercial holidaying - travelling just to get away from it all. To see something new simply because we’d already seen everything at home. Travel not for knowledge, but as a cure for disaffection and ennui. A change of scenery. A break from everyday.
It made me realise that what we lack mostly in the twenty-first century appears to be an everyday home life where we can relax and let go of the daily stresses and pressures of life. The chores, the bills, the responsibilities. That the need we are fulfilling when we trot across the globe today is the basic need to be able to live a life unfettered by all that and that we cannot seem to achieve that basic need at home. That home and work have become so conflated that we now need to work hard enough to be able to earn the ability to pay someone to take us away from our homes at least once a year to live, for one week, for two, the sort of life we would ideally want to be living all year round but do not have the economic system in place to support. I drive around Scotland for seventeen days yes, to learn more about Scotland and see more of the continent on which I live, but also because if I had seventeen days at home I would feel guilty just indulging in fun and exploration for that time. Being away gives me an excuse to enjoy myself whereas at home I would feel guilty that I wasn’t spending at least some of that time working or doing one of the many domestic chores that an average working life forces us to put off. I drive around Scotland for seventeen days because I have never been to Scotland beyond the cities before, but also to forcibly take myself away from the reality of my everyday life and live an actual life for a brief few weeks before returning to the drudgery of the norm.
This is not to say that a world where our everyday lives were truly fulfilling would be a world without travel. Travel, as I have said, seems tied into our desire to learn more about the world and our circumstances, and as humans we are always seeking to learn. But it is arguable that the sort of travel we tend to indulge in these days, linked as it is to relaxation and getting away, might not be needed so much if we were already relaxed and comfortable where we are. Remembering what a privilege it is to be able to travel at all, we might reduce its unnecessary frequency by limiting the need to go beyond our homes for everything we need. We might choose to limit our carbon footprint and recognise that the wonders of the world are not a tickbox list of sights we all have to see in order to collect and scratch off a map. That we don’t all have to go see the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China or the Colosseum before we die, and that doing so probably isn’t the answer to all the problems in our lives that will still be waiting for us upon our return. That these heralded human accomplishments are surely a marvel to behold, but they are also constructs of commercialism turned into profitable commodities for local economies to sell you as empty a consumerist dream as any other bit of clever advertising. I will no more die unhappy that I never saw Christ the Redeemer in Brazil than I will that I never played an X-box, wore Nike, or drank a Budweiser. The idea that I am missing out by not doing such things are simply useful lies concocted by those who stand to benefit from my commerce if I buy into them. Whole generations of people lived and died entirely meaningful lives without doing any of those things either. They found other things to keep them occupied and sought satisfaction closer to home. It is not impossible that we could do the same.
I’m not advocating that we stop travelling (although it would probably somewhat benefit the environment if we did). I don’t want us to stop taking advantage of the amazing opportunities to see the world at our fingertips today. I am simply reminding us that it is important to acknowledge that this is a particular privilege of being alive in a world with the current technological advancements we enjoy at this particular moment in time, and that we ought to be mindful of the potentially corrupting influences in our relationship with those technologies due to the powerful commercial economic arrangements in place. It is not our entitlement to see the world, or even the entirety of our own countries, and many of us will not get to do so in our lifetimes. And even those who do attempt it will only ever see a limited portion of what is out there, mediated through the necessary compromises of their choices, time-restrictions, and personal interests. We therefore need to stop and take a minute to ask ourselves why we are travelling when we travel. Are we travelling to achieve something specific, or because it is just something we unthinkingly do. What, if anything, are we learning? And, if we are learning nothing and just travelling to get away from it all, why is it that we currently have to get away from our everyday lives to achieve what our day to day existence should, but currently fails to, fulfil?
Author: DaN McKee
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