The Hope of Travel and All We Say About It
What are we looking to find “out there” that we can’t seem to find right here, right now?
“I have finished my Travells, and I am now transcribing them; they are admirable things, and will wonderfully mend the world.”[1]
-Johnathan Swift to his friend Charles Ford, August 14, 1725
Why do we often find ourselves dreaming of elsewhere? For some of us, our restlessness compels us to wander. We can’t stand the idea of “vegetating in one little corner of the world all one’s life” as Mark Twain put it. We yearn to uncover some deeper meaning or truth to life and often suspect it’s somewhere far away, beyond the horizon. So we set off in search of it, fueled with wanderlust and hope at our backs. What are we seeking to gain from our travels and adventures—for ourselves or others or both? What is it that we are looking to find “out there,” that we can’t seem to find right here, right now?
We all possess many hopes in life. Some of us hope we’ll strike it rich sooner than later and be able to provide for our families for the rest of our lives. Some of us hope we’ll find a tight-knit family and community to weather the storms of life together. Some of us want love and good health. Some of our hopes are purely selfish, craving fame, fortune, and all acts of hedonistic pleasure.
The hope of travel seems to uniquely stand apart from our normal list of hopes because rather than wanting these ordinary things, the hopes of travel often appear more philosophical or transcendent. When we come to think of traveling or embarking on a quest of adventure, what is it we’re initially hoping for? Why do we become fixated on this mental process of preemptively imbuing our journeys with some anticipating force? In short, what do we hope travel will do for us? The British author Alain de Botton in The Art of Travel, writes,
“If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.”
Again, the hopes of our travels seem somewhat distinct from hopes of everyday life, mainly because we believe that by going elsewhere we can obtain something that we can’t obtain where we presently stand. It may be to simply get away for a vacation, to rejuvenate body and mind. It may be a longer excursion meant to “find ourselves” or restore us to a former more spontaneous and adventurous version of ourselves. Perhaps we’ve suffered a loss and require time to grieve and cope with the sufferings of life. For some, it may simply be all in good fun. Maybe we are attempting to escape from some unbearable facts of our present circumstances. Others may be looking to test themselves, say courageously summiting a mountain or jumping out of a plane to “feel alive.” There are indeed many hopes we imagine our travels will fulfill for us.
There is often something deeper below the surface motivating many of us to strive to uncover something more about ourselves and the nature of this world when we travel. But do we necessarily need to go looking for it “out there” beyond the horizon? Why might strolling the streets of Paris on a fall moonlit night enchant us in a way our midwestern town with the same temperature and phase of the moon does not? Is there something in the architecture, history, or culture of a place that magically awakens something in our minds where other places lack such power or mystique because we’ve become too habituated to our hometowns? Why does the piney woodsmoke smell and dancing flames of our campfire tend to intoxicate us with full contentment while in the backcountry of a national park much more so than having a fire in our backyard? Hawaii, French Polynesia, Nepal, Kathmandu, Tunisia, Morocco, Santorini, Rome, Paris. What exactly is it we imagine these places can do for us and why do we imbue certain places with such talismanic symbolism and power?
We may discover the paradox of travel that after we’ve journeyed far and wide to visit “there” it quickly becomes “here” again—fading from mysterious and enchanting to gradually becoming familiar and known, albeit never entirely so. The restless wanderer in us soon develops itchy feet once more and begins contemplating “out there” once again. Is this the wanderer’s lot in life—to be perpetually restless, always searching for more—whatever that more may be?
There are many hopes to travel but perhaps my greatest hope is that it will always serve as a reminder that we live in a vast universe of the unknown with limited minds, that we should always be humbled by our ignorance, and that travel will always possess the capacity to restore us and nudge us to be less presumptuous and more generous and kind to others. If more of us were granted more opportunities to wander, might we all reach that conclusion? Who knows, maybe it would even lead us to “wonderfully mend the world.” Is that idealism and romanticism speaking or perhaps a law of the universe or cosmic truth we either do or do not recognize in consciousness?
Notes
[1] “Travells” here refers to Swift’s soon-to-be published work Gulliver’s Travels (1726) rather than Swift’s personal travels. As a master of satire, Swift is likely being flippant here in his letter to his friend.
For consideration:
● What have been your hopes for your travels?
● Did your expectations meet your initial hopes?
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Cheers!
-JSB
I love the reference to the term "human flourishing".
All of us desire some mix of the old and new in our worlds, a split between the familiar and unfamiliar. I think this is true in many aspects of our lives including our travels. In my everyday life, while I usually drive the same roads, I love finding different ways to get from Point A to Point B. On a grander scale, we'll eventually return to Paris. But, in the meantime, we are drawn to new and intriguing destinations.
I am an American who has been drawn to exploring other countries for as long as I can remember. My motivation was to learn more about the people who live there, to experience their culture, taste their food, listen to their music, understand how they think about different aspects of life. To do this more fully, I wanted to live in a country and learn the language, not simply tour 10 countries in 10 days. Every place where I have spent considerable amounts of time (Mexico, Quebec, Afghanistan, Holland, Austria, Ireland) has expanded my understanding of the world and increased my capacity to understand the similarities that all human beings share regardless of appearances.