Gin Joints
There are powerful forces to be uncovered as we go about the world - if we reflect honestly enough on what brings us to the places we go
Welcome to Travel is Dangerous - a newsletter with essays and stories about travel and what it does to us. Subscribe Now for free regular updates.
“We are where we are, because we’ve been what we’ve been.”
- Sigmund Freud
And we are where we are, because we’ve been where we’ve been.
But why did we go there?
We’ll get a thought, one that arrives perfectly formed in our minds as if it’s always been ours: that we’ve always wanted to go here or visit there or do this or see that, or sometimes just that it might be convenient to take a Ryanair flight for a cheap weekend away.
Sometimes it’s just somewhere, anywhere.
You decide to ask someone out because you bumped into them at a pub, or they were the only one who acknowledged you when you said hello, or because they’re the last one left in your little one horse town.
Sometimes it’s just someone, anyone.
But we very quickly tell ourselves after the fact that this is where we wanted to go all along.
Where do these desires come from?
The less we know about the world, the less we know about ourselves. Much of this knowledge and self-knowledge comes from our interaction with our environment (space) through our lives (time).
We move through both and uncover the fog of war that clouds our map of reality.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate”
- C.G. Jung
Eventually you dig deep enough, and you start to uncover your true desires. It’s part of the process of making the unconscious conscious.
We are drawn to things in the world around us, attracted to them.
Objects, people, places, ways of living.
But you don’t just set out on an adventure from Ireland, take one step and end up in America, or Brazil, or Outer Mongolia. The first step of exploring the world begins where you stand. And the first step of exploring your own Sekf begins with what you know.
Or what you don’t.
Everyone is different, everyone is the same. Depending on where life has brought you thus far, your first great solo adventure might involve jumping on a plane to the other side of the world, or it might take you to Dublin. But modernity has clouded things.
You can go anywhere now. It’s cheap, and it’s easy.
Airdropping you in Azerbaijan doesn’t mean you’ll automatically set off on a great adventure, and discover great and terrible things about yourself. You might take a few photos and head straight for the Irish pub. Or move to Australia and spend two years working and living with Irish people from your home town before moving home, wallet a bit lighter and feeling good and happy about yourself. There’s nothing wrong with it.
It all depends on what you want.
Or what you want to find out.
Our unconscious mind knows far more about these things than your conscious mind. Which is why, if you go to the places you’re attracted to, this is where you’ll find the lessons which you alone need to learn.
Whether you learn them or not is another story altogether.
This isn’t always easy, having that which you desire. It might serve you a few harsh lessons. It’s these you need to learn from. If you don’t, you might keep ending up in places which aren’t right for you. The wrong relationships. Bad jobs. Down some darkened alley with the wrong person and what looks like no escape. Ending up in the wrong places, maybe even at the wrong time.
On some level we always know what we’re getting ourselves in for.
Because on some level, it is exactly what we want.
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is why intentions are important. Setting an intention is the act of trying to make the reasons for doing things as conscious as possible. It’s a two-way thing, the relationship between conscious and unconscious. You can override it by choice.
Though it takes practice.
So far, so personal, so self-indulgent. To treat the world as your own personal self-development playground. The notion that you’re the main character in the story, and every time you travel out the door to Tesco you’re embarking on an epic quest, the tale of which leads more like the Book of Revelations than the Beano.
But what if there’s more to it than our own personal intentions, beliefs, desires?
We want to dig down deep into our authentic desires, to find our true Self and become that which we’re meant to be – but where does our true Self come from?
It’s journeys all the way down.
Until you start practice some manner of acceptance. Of where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going. Acceptance that no matter how far you dig, and how much you make conscious, that maybe you’ve spent your life being drawn to places by forces you could never grasp the nature of.
Travel far and wide to break your attachments not just to everything you’ve ever known or been taught, but to your very concept of reality and how it works.
Acceptance leads to detachment, first from your beliefs about the nature of how things work, ideas and facts and information you were only taught, confirming them with your own eyes but only because you believe it still to be true, and only because you want them to be true.
And then from the nature of reality itself. Of things you could never explain as a series of coincidences and fortunate or unfortunate events.
Our unconscious reveals more than we could ever imagine. Like attracts like, even across vast swathes of space and time.
We assume that if we get on a plane and fly somewhere, that everything that greets us there is already set in stone. The geography hasn’t changed since the Ice Age. The infrastructure has existed for a century. The hotels are all up on Trip Advisor, they’re in the Lonely Planet book. The people you come across have already lived there, or were always going to be passing through, and your happening upon them is just a matter of coincidence and timing. Your plans and your trip do not – and could not – affect the lives of millions of others, or of the universe, and certainly not from the future, or across different timelines.
You’re not so special, after all.
Everything, everyone – and everywhere – in the world is connected.
Your actions and intentions have vast repercussions. Your beliefs can change the past, and the future. You think that when you’re packing your bags that the country you’re visiting is already there, and everything that happens to you on that trip is by mere chance, or your own good planning?
Think again.
Dig deep enough into your unconscious until you realise it’s personal and self-fulfilling journeys all the way down.
Until, that is, you let go.
It is this acceptance which allows space for divine intervention.
Call it quantum mechanics or call it God.
At certain points in life you’ll encounter certain people in certain places that will flip everything you know on its head and throw your entire world off its axis.
These moments are nuclear bombs to your awareness, they shatter your illusion of reality and call into question everything you ever thought you knew about the world, and thus yourself.
And if you look closely, honestly and with detachment from what your beliefs were, the circumstances of these meetings and these events will make you realise that not only do you know far less than you thought you did, but far less than you could ever know.
You’ll realise that some of the circumstances of happening to come across certain people, and wandering into certain places, at certain times in your life, that not just the timing, but their very existence, could not have been random, nor could it have been the product of simple cause and effect and coincidence.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world – she walks into yours.
And in the expanded moment of awareness of what is happening, it will be like you knew to be there be all along.
Our unconscious is guided by the Self, and it knows things it has no right to know, according to the laws of physics or the theories of modern psychology.
It is connected to forces far beyond our comprehension.
It’s clear to me now that the Self can lead us to the most perfect of places at the most appropriate – and strangest – of times.
But beyond the limits of what we know, or ever could know – is it possible that it also creates them?
If you enjoyed reading this, then subscribe now for free regular essays and stories
Excellent, Gavin, sobering thoughts about unexamined lives pushed along by unconscious mimetic desires that push us, and a lot of the times it's towards so-called bad luck situations, which seem repeat themselves.