If our lives are dominated by a search happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardour and paradoxes — than our travels.
Alain de Botton, in his book The Art of Travel, provides us a new way to look at travelling. After all, the pleasure that we derive from our journeys depends a lot on the mindset with which we travel, sometimes even more than our destination or mode of travel. We don’t think too much about that, though. Our focus is almost always on where we are travelling to, not how and why? De Botton explores these ideas in the book and — through that exploration — helps us learn something fundamental, yet profound, about the art of travel.
Escape from the known
Few seconds in life are more releasing than those in which a plane ascends to the sky. There is psychological pleasure in this take off, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our lives. When we look through the windows, we feel inspired by the ascent and movement. We hope that one day we too might surge above much that now looms over us. The eye attempts to match what it can see with what the mind knows should be there, like a reader trying to decipher a familiar book in a new language. The escape from our everyday lives, even for a short time, adds such excitement that we can barely sit still. It’s a reminder that leaving behind certain things in life is not a bad idea at all.
A mistake we make
It so happens that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity. This means that when the new information about a place comes, it feels useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain. This problem is compounded by geography: the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that are only a few feet apart in space, but leagues apart in what would be required to appreciate them. You have museum, church, casino, restaurant, mall and what-not not too far from one another. Having made a journey to a place we may never revisit, we feel obliged to admire a sequence of things without any connection to one another apart from their geographical location. It is like prescribing books according to their size and not the content. If only we had time and space to appreciate each one of them separately, it would be a far richer experience.
That feeling of awe
Why do we leave the comforts of our hotel rooms and spend time looking at the vastness of the Himalayas or an ocean? Why does it fill with awe and wonder? One answer is that not everything which is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment; it may also arouse awe and wonder, even respect. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble. A bull may arouse a feeling of the sublime, a piranha does not.
Even when not in mountains or beaches, the behaviour of others and our own flaws are prone to leave us feeling small. Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the world of men. It is not unusual for our will to be defied and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy. Rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. They tell us that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary, but we can accept that with grace and not humiliation.
The art of travel
As mentioned in the beginning, the pleasure comes not only from the places we visit but also with a certain mindset, the travelling mindset we should say. What is this travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is good, what is interesting etc. We take risks, even small ones. We find a normal shop in a new place unusually fascinating. We pay attention to everything around us, the people, places, news — pretty much everything. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs.
At home, we feel a sense of contentment. As if we have discovered all that we need to and we are fine with it. The feeling of curiosity and wonder is gone. We have become habituated and therefore blind. But it does not have to be that way. We don’t always need new places to discover something new — about the world as well as ourselves — any place can do that. All we need is the eyes of a traveller and the curiosity of a child.
Kalampedia 