I once asked the most financially successful person I know for advice on how to live well. I was curious about what was inside this person that drove him to make so much money. After all, one’s assets are the largest determinant of merit in our culture, right? Expecting to hear something about assessing risk, work ethic, or saving, he paused and then told me to travel as often as I could.
“Travel,” he said, “is the best education we can give ourselves.”
Pfpht. That’s ’cause you can afford it, I thought immediately. But then he went on to tell me that he’d begun his career only after he was sure his exploration was finished; when it was clear to him that he could stop and not continue to wonder.
Of all the statements that have been made on the subject – its weight and effect – Mark Twain captured it best: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” As usual, Twain’s words are timeless and uncanny in their relevance.
What if this year you made the call – picked up and left? What would you lose? More importantly, what might you gain? If you don’t take the time to consider the possibility, to think about if you could work it out, you might regret it forever.
Life-changing travel needn’t be grandiose or even foreign. Think about Jack Kerouac and the quintessential American road trip. One of the experiences I’ve drawn from most when trying to understand the state of our country was a month-long, meandering road trip I took with a buddy to his home in Detroit and back. It was the summer after my freshman year of college. I had very little money, but that made it even better. We took the most inefficient route we could conceive and crossed state lines, viewing them as if they were international borders.
I remember, not as vividly as I’d like, stumbling out of a blues club in Chicago at 4 a.m. with the band still rocking behind me, the straw from the bar floor stuck to my shoes. We hailed a cab to a friend’s apartment and days later were in Montana on the Yellowstone river – an entirely different universe to experience and try to know. From surrounding skyscrapers to surrounding mountains, from the pulse of a city to the lull of open space, we hadn’t gone that far, but might as well have been on the other side of the world.
It’s possible to reap the lessons of traveling to which Twain refers in your everyday life. When you put down this paper, look around. What characterizes your setting? What defines a place, its people and its environment? When we travel, we set out with ambitions to understand our destinations. But what if we brought those ambitions home? Perhaps we would learn how to live better in each other’s company, at home and in our communities.
We constantly read and are told that perspective makes everything relative. If that is true, a drive through rural Cottage Grove can be as much a travel experience as a walk along the River Seine. It all depends on how you approach it, what you choose to see and what you bring home. Even within our nation, our state and our county, people lead very different lives in different cultures with a unique history and relevance to us in our own individual lives. Perception is at the heart of travel. Its essence is in your approach. When you do sit down with a map and begin to contemplate the possibilities of where to go, what to see and do, keep your perspective in mind, because travel is a state of mind. Then, it doesn’t really matter where you go, because you’re constantly arriving.
[email protected]