Real Travel

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Like Hsuan Tsang, real travelers today are in pursuit of the original sources, in this case, places that haven’t been sanitized, ordered, and commodified by modern civilization. As we get nearer to these sources, we uncover deeper rhythms, which anchor us to something more than the next home entertainment purchase. Graham Greene called this a hankering for 'a stage further back,' a 'nostalgia for something lost.' He hit on the heart of the matter, because the drive to live an authentic life is one of the strongest of our pyschological needs. Denial or distortion of authenticity causes neurosis. When we’re authentic, we’re in sync with the world around us.

This sense of harmony opens us to the realm of the sacred, where the discordant, the dissonant, the incomplete, the disparate, the conflicted come together in resolution. It’s the goal of all the world’s major religions under a variety of names: oneness, Nirvana, peace. And it’s what every pilgrim, every personal explorer, seeks.

Travel is a celebration of variety and simultaneously an affirmation of the universal. When I first started traveling in college, I was drawn by the distant and exotic, but now I know that what I really seek is a feeling I rarely experience at home: a sense of effortlessly dropping into alignment with the universe. It happens through the serendipitous events that are tossed up by the rhythm of the road—I’ll wind up in a place I didn’t intend to go to but discover that it’s just where I wanted to be, had to be. And it happens continuously with local people and fellow travelers.

Freed from the usual sources of definition—job, friends, car, area code—we can slip out of entrenched identities and realize pyschologist Abraham Maslow’s self-actualizing imperative 'to become more and more what one is.' When you’re in accord with yourself, it seems to exert a gravitational pull on others to join you in the synchronous swing of things. The road spontaneously ignites one-to-one encounters unlike anything we know in the workaday world. The social dynamics of travel—anonymity, limited time, engaged curiosity, switched-off competitive drive—create a framework of commonality, not difference, which makes for intense and heartfelt interaction. A Zimbabwean journalist inducts me into the rituals of the local dance floor at a working-class beer hall in Harare. A Fijian cane farmer invites me into his home for dinner and a stroll through the family photo album. Within hours, I know AWOL marketing directors and glass salesmen, Swiss teachers and French backpackers better than folks I’ve worked with at home for years.

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