What is travel if not a geographical way to break up routines of movement and be opened up to unfamiliar environments, people, places, objects and networks?
Anyone who feels like they want to experience the world more directly ‘as it really is’ as opposed to just a ‘world’ within a world; the private flat, the office ‘world’, the bar, the coffee shop, the infrastructure of a holiday resort created for leisure, a package adventure holiday, the business world, will need to create a ‘vehicle’ and support structure for themselve; a mental and physical support structure that allows them to exist outside of existing and preceding structure, perhaps albeit temporarily. Changing your world will feel strange and take effort.
If you spend a significant amount of time reading the mainstream news, watching television or playing online games such as Party Poker then you might need to rearrange how you use your time.
However, taking the example of playing an online game, I was recently in contact with a Couchsurfer who had been a professional poker player and had gone on a journey to find a particular unusually successful and young player and then written about the experience.
His interest lead him to make the journey. Being driven to take action, to research and travel to study an aspect of culture may allow you to connect with others who have similar obsessional interest and curiosity.
If travel is to get away from people then you will always find people in the strangest places and failing that certainly be in contact with nature, possibly not in the most favourable way such as the fate of Alexander Supertramp in ‘Into the Wild’. However, if he had been a little better prepared then he may have survived.
Anyone who wants to experience the world can take a walk without a purpose through a city, perhaps from East to West or following a river or a geographical feature rather than for the common reason for travel; to get from A to B. If you want to explore outside of the support structures that already exist then you need to be prepared whether that is, with the walk example, by talking warm clothes, a rucksack, food, water and a destroyed map or assembling a more complex trip.
Existing interests, even ‘distractions’ can be turned around to create meaningful pursuits if approached in a critically reflective way or forming a well considered program of investigation that requires interaction with people, objects and networks out there in the world.
This post contains an affiliate link. Read my policy on this here.
Related posts:
This entry has no comments
You have a wonderful opportunity to be the first to comment!