The Travel Bug
The chronic desire to go on journeys is a feature, not a bug, of the spirit. Though we should be careful where it takes us, as what we think we want is not the spirit's priority
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End of Days
Summer was burning itself away, the Fall returning after a year around the sun.
Which meant my bureaucratic licence to roam free away from Home was reaching its expiry date.
The end was nigh. I had two choices, the same two choices everyone has at every moment of their lives: to stay, or to go.
And to go where? Home? A few weeks after I’d landed in Canada I remember declaring effusively to myself that I was going to spend the rest of my twenties abroad, I was so high on experience I never wanted to come down. It wasn’t that I didn’t like home, but I quite quickly grew to love being away from it.
I was either going to renew my working holiday visa and stay in Revelstoke another year, to spend another winter living my best life finding the perfect line on the Hill, and continuing to build on everything I had made in the place over the last year.
Or I was going to go somewhere else, and do it all over again.
I’d gotten my first taste of life abroad, one where I was free to do whatever I wanted to do, and to go wherever I wanted to go, even if that meant being holed up in a rural village in the mountains for the best part of a year and not going anywhere. My first taste of freedom, freed from confines that weren’t physical but spiritual – no direction to grow other than what had been prescribed, by God knows whom.
We’ll blame our parents, or society or the culture we grew up in. We’re all the same, whether we’re from the west of Ireland or the middle of Africa. But there are no distinct places around the earth; there’s only Home, or Away. And at Home, we’re all told the same things:
Listen in school, study in college, send in your CV, do the job, etc. Some might think the stabilisers of life make things easier, that the more order to things the better, but I’d always found it hard to get to grips with them. And in hindsight, there was nobody necessarily forcing me on this track. I seemed to be stuck to it out of my own ignorance. I simply knew no other way. You can blame others for not telling you, but there’s a certain amount of responsibility due on any person who remains asleep at their own wheel. They enjoy it. They are spiritually lazy, even when reality offers them the alternatives over and over again: they become narcoleptic.
I became exposed to entirely new ways of life and living, new paths and new possibilities, simply by exploring one small corner of the earth that wasn’t my own. They even spoke the same language as me, to make spelling things out literally a lot easier. In school we’d been given two options: be above average academically and progress on to further education, or be below average academically (and, it was implied, in general intelligence and competence) and go on to do some sort of trade or manual work, or otherwise be forgotten about and ignored. And part of this shepherding was the implicit (and sometimes explicit) brainwashing that only one of these paths would be satisfactory in order for us to have a decent, respectable life. As I said, I didn’t really stick to the track I chose; it turned out the real world wasn’t as straightforward as school, where all you’ve to do to survive and thrive is repeat the words you’re given back to the authorities at a later date. Though the tragic realisation that this is, in fact, how the rat race of the so-called Real World operates, just on a grander and more complex and more pathetic scale, is one that many are never able to fully articulate; one of life’s beautiful secrets is that you have to jump into the sea to find out the ship was sinking all along.
Even better: you can swim.
Everyone I’d met in my adult life had been living through some variation of life in my hometown, whose lives were predetermined by connection to that single place, one which to me at that point still the centre of the universe in every sense of the world; or through college, and thus attached with varying degrees of dedication to the ongoing education system, and thus, the wider System of the world.
Away from these stifling spiritual scaffolds for the first time I met people who hadn’t necessarily followed either of those paths: orbiting their hometowns or becoming paid-up subscribers to the Combine, the rewards of which were consumerist treats, social status and the proud designation of being Normal. Almost everyone here had left their homes at least temporarily to be here. There came with relocation to Revelstoke an implicit thirst for freedom, for wildness, for adrenaline, for adventure. It could have been a town on the west coast of Ireland, though if it had been, I’d never have stopped driving through, never have even known it existed, never have been paying attention to the right things to see what was there – parallel dimensions exist in this world.
Living apart from not just my family and friends, but the known world of my upbringing was, as they say, an eye-opener. My first time travelling. Travel is not about where you go but your experience of it, it’s all relative. I’d had the doors blown open on my perception of reality. It dawned on me at various points throughout the year that all that I’d known before had been blinkered by the fact that I couldn’t know anymore. Plato’s Cave had been lit up, at least a little. Seeing yourself held up to the light to be viewed objectively for the first time, you realise that everyone you’ve ever met until now has been lying to you in some way. Your family. Your friends. The wider society. All perpetuating the same lies, about you and themselves, lies that nobody is guilty of, the lies that are simply implicit in the culture, the things that everyone does but nobody questions why, those poisonous things you do and the lies you spread yourself, and nobody can tell you otherwise because they don’t recognise them themselves, and it’s all for the greater good, and that’s just how things have always been done around here, we keep doing the things that slowly kill us all.
I’d seen the light outside the cave for the first time.
And I was hooked.
Travel Sickness
Hooked on what though? My new home, or the journey that comes with making a new home?
I appeared to have self-diagnosed myself with an affliction which predates civilisation and is an endemic part of the human condition, the desire to leave home and where you’re from and to go somewhere else, or to wander from place to place. It is not about relocation as much as it is, as Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue put it: it is to be someone
“who gives priorities to the duties of longing and belonging.”
The core orientation of the Wanderer is not towards Home, or in living according to values such as striving towards happiness, or striving to work, or to sacrifice, or to exert responsibility, or to show compassion to others, or even the opposite of any of those things; it is the nature of one who is driven by the yin and yang impulses of belonging somewhere, and longing to be somewhere else.
It has always been an innate desire of humans and all species of life, ever since we realised that often our only chance of survival was to retreat rather than approach an external force in our environment. For many, the greatest perceived threat is Home itself, and one of the major conveniences of modernity is that it allows us to be in constant state of flight, from pretty much everything concrete or real, indefinitely, and with little expense or major effort.
“New possibilities are more attractive and intoxicating than the given situation.”
O’Donohue continues,
“Freedom is highly prized.”
The Wanderer is not driven, as many migrants are, by the desire to find the perfect home; instead they are in a constant state of wishing to be somewhere else. It is not that any place does not appeal to them or that they are never satisfied – it is the longing itself, and acting on it, that gives them satisfaction.
I decided to leave Revelstoke when my year was up, despite having found a corner of paradise there on Earth. And this decision was partly because, like so many of my generation, instead of crediting the incredible experience I’d had over the past year to the place I’d stumbled into quite inadvertently, and the Home I’d made there, I’d gotten it into my head that moving from place to place was the reason I was so happy where I was. I believed it wasn’t the beautiful new home, but the fact that that I wasn’t at home, that my life had been blessed with such transcendent fortune and revelation.
In short, I believed that I was a traveller.
And so I wanted to live my life as such: I wanted to go travelling.
“I Love to Travel”
It is not the world we’re searching for but the unknown, and the unknown intrigues us because it contains an infinite well of ourselves. On some level we have come to understand that the unknown – the new, the novel, the chaotic – holds a mirror up to ourselves and our lives. It is a threat to many, but intoxicating to others.
The first trip is one that alerts us to this fact, and so alien is this feeling, of seeing our reflection for the first time, that it becomes a fixation, an obsession, an itch we can’t scratch; and so obscure is this ability to see ourselves in the third person, held away for the first time from the spiritual scaffolding of our family, our friends, our culture so that we may be inspected more closely in the light. This feeling of self-reflection is so novel to most of us, whether by choice or by circumstance that we have even labelled it a sickness: “The Travel Bug”.
But the Bug has been mis-diagnosed. It is used as an excuse to sell holidays, products, and nowadays entire personalities, and in many cases the mis-diagnosis must indeed be genuine, for it’s no accident of history and linguistics that the words we use to describe journeys and trips around the globe and country are the same terms used to describe journeys and trips of more spiritual and psychedelic natures. The compulsion to travel is as old as time itself, one is permanently in one of two places: Home, or Away. Though how many of the population are truly at home never being at home?
Who doesn’t like new places and experiences? But to offer a counter-question, who also never feels quite comfortable when they’re at home? The cliches pervade the social media reels and the dating app profiles of those who claim they are “always looking for the next adventure?”.
“I love to travel” or so everyone claims.
Yeah, well who doesn’t? And who doesn’t love to eat and piss and shit and fuck and breathe gulp after gulp after gulp of air, upon waking and throughout the day, every day, for the rest of their lives.
Travel has become the newest consumerism, this collecting of experiences, not things, though the experiences are collected and displayed on social media timelines like diamond necklaces. Travel has thus become an entire personality to many, though as with many aspects of people’s personas, it would be good to question their origins.
Perhaps this restlessness is because they have felt the call, at some point on a holiday away from home. Something about the place made them want to stay, though they couldn’t, they were scheduled to return home.
But it’s possible to get mixed signals. We hear the call of a true and necessary adventure of the soul and mistake it for the chronic desire to go on holidays and buy things. But a holiday is simply a break from our current life, and then we go back. It is a form of entertainment, like watching a movie. We see things from afar, a distance, in passing, as tourists. We cannot touch them, and thus cannot meaningfully change them, nor they cannot transform us, like watching ourselves fumble through a dream.
But like a dream, the experience resonates with us in some way. It is not an adventure itself, though the things we see may stay with us and give us cause to reflect. But they’re not the journey, only the inspiration for them, glimpses of what we see. The desire to travel is not a ‘bug’, it is a beautiful feature of the spirit, but it should not be confused with mere holidays. When we feel a chronic desire to travel to faraway places, perhaps we should ask ourselves what it is we are trying to take a break from? And if we would prefer to return to something different, or not return at all?
We all desire to explore the limits of the world, but we don’t realise the power of truly breaking through those limits. To miss the return flight at the end of the week and remain indefinitely, suspended in chaos. You take a proper good run and a jump and remain, suspended in the light in a place that isn’t home – it is away, which is to say, in a state of chaos. Like stretching out an elastic band, the spiritual scaffolding of your known world begins to stretch and strain groan, until the strings begin to ping and snap, first one and then two and then three. You go home at some time, the structure of home, and therefore most of who you are, remains mostly intact, but it’s that little bit weaker.
You are broken in some way, but once recovered, you are more yourself than ever.
The Fall
I left Revelstoke because I thought I wanted to travel. Life was good there. I’d a kind of paradise in the first place I’d stumbled into. It was the perfect place for me to stay, to settle for a while, to grow, to enjoy myself, to build something, and most importantly: to enjoy some sort of rigid freedom, for true freedom must have some sort of order to it. I had made myself a home, imperfectly and sometimes hilariously, and perhaps not a permanent one, but a home nonetheless. It had everything I wanted.
But, like so many others, I got the travel bug, the bug not so much being the thing itself but the belief that one’s foremost passion and purpose in life is to simply wander from place to place, starting over again and again.
A journey cannot take place in absolute chaos, because a journey needs to have a beginning and an end. If it’s all beginnings, then you’re starting something new every time.
We all want to believe we are a renegade, a maverick, a pioneer. A true adventurer. The temptation to travel is real, though the repeated giving into temptation leads to hubris.
I thought that because I’d done it once, that it was the travelling that had brought me happiness, rather than the place I’d found myself in. I had found my cake and wanted to continue eating it. If I could do it once, I could do it over and over again. Everything I could have ever dreamed of had come to me just by taking the chance and trusting in the universe. Why not do it again, and again? Hooked on the feeling of journeying into the unknown, of taking trip after trip just for that feeling of novelty, chasing a high.
I wanted to go everywhere.
The grass is always greener on the other side, though first loves don’t happen more than once. One should be grateful for what they have. I had everything I could have ever wanted from a place in Revelstoke, and yet I became convinced, not that I wanted more of this wonderful happiness, but that I wanted to see the world, to sample its variety, and that having done it once, I could do it all over again. It had all been so easy, the first time around.
I was special. It wasn’t that I’d been blessed – I had done it all myself, assuming that my natural charms, competence and virtue had brought me these transcendent and blissful experiences, when in fact it was more of a mixture of luck, the compassionate good will of others, and things which in hindsight can only be attributed to acts of God.
I would have been happy and content and at home in Revelstoke, though maybe I didn’t go there in the first place to be happy. Now I believed I wanted to travel, and maybe I was more right than I knew. My next few trips away from Home would prove to be much more difficult, disastrous and often depressing than this first life-changing trip to the mountains. I’d later learn that travel doesn’t give you what you want, but what you need, and maybe what I needed from Canada was that first life-affirming taste for adventure – what some might call ‘The Travel Bug’ – before subsequent journeys offered much more sobering reflections of reality. Giving into the temptation to leave was both the original sin and the purpose of the journey in itself, the thing that would lead me away from the Garden of Eden, but it is only by falling that it’s possible to find your way back to heaven on Earth.
The Grass is Always Greener
In Ireland they say that the city of Galway is ‘the graveyard of ambition’, but Revelstoke was the graveyard of mine. It was both the thing and the place that awakened the Call to Adventure in me in the first place, and also killed it, the divine fall from grace of the innocence of my youth. After spending a year of my life there, I wanted more from life than I’d ever known could be attained, but I also wanted nothing other than one simple thing:
Freedom.
To the soul, the most beautiful thing of all is freedom. Little did I know that there I had it moreso than I ever would again in my life. And I had youth, the greatest freedom of all. You know something is true on the deepest levels because its opposite is also true: I was innocent when I got to Revelstoke, and even though being Away from Home – anywhere at all – awakened me to the possibilities of life more than I ever could have imagined, in a way I was even more innocent when I left.
With this knowledge of all the paths I now knew lay around me and could be chosen to embark on through the rest of my life, of those paths people take orienting them towards work, or sacrifice, or responsibility, or compassion for others, or even just their own happiness and contentment, or the opposite of any of those things: all I’ve ever wanted is to be free.
It’s telling then, too, that of all the places I’ve ever been in my life, and of all the places I’ve ever lived, Revelstoke is the only one I ever regret leaving.
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