Anatomy of Travel: Staving Off Restlessness Requires a Shift in Perspective Not Geography

Travel is often thought to alleviate restlessness. However, we cannot all travel all the time. How do we find contentment wherever we are?

Image generated using Canva from the prompt ‘wanderer in the mountains’.

“Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? Some travel for business. But there is no economic reason for me to go, and every reason to stay put. My motives, then, are materially irrational. What is this neurotic restlessness, the gadfly that tormented the Greeks? Wandering may settle some of my natural curiosity and my urge to explore, but then I am tugged back by a longing for home. I have a compulsion to wander and a compulsion to return—a homing instinct like a migrating bird.”

-Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989 (published posthumously 1997)

Many of us struggle to understand why we are so restless in the modern world. I suspect that much of the structure of society and our lives inhibits our wanderlust and freedom to choreograph our lives as we see fit. As a consequence, we may suffer from bouts of depression, anxiety, and a longing we can’t quite articulate. In other words, it seems obvious to me that working 9-5 for 40+ years with limited opportunities to even take one’s annual vacation is not all that conducive to one’s well-being. As I wrote in a previous post,

“Given our extensive evolutionary history being nomadic hunter-gatherers, I can’t help but think that part of the reason so many of us feel restless, anxious, depressed, angry, cynical, or lacking inspiration nowadays is that the structure of our society and culture is no longer fully in line with how we are physically and psychologically primed.”

Lately, I’ve been studying some of the core essays by the British travel writer Bruce Chatwin from his collection of essays Anatomy of Restlessness. Most notably, the third section of the book on ‘The Nomadic Alternative’ contains three essays that get to the heart of Chatwin’s views on human travel: ‘Letter to Tom Maschler’, ‘The Nomadic Alternative’, and ‘It’s a Nomad Nomad World’, respectively.

I’ve been working on my own book about travel and adventure for several years now and reading how much Chatwin’s thoughts profoundly overlap with my own gave me goosebumps. Here he is saying more or less the same message I derived from my own studies of human evolution and hunter-gatherer societies,

“Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time. We are travellers from birth. Our mad obsession with technological progress is a response to barriers in the way of our geographical progress.”

It’s astounding how independently human thought and ideas arise. Some years ago, I read Chatwin’s other works, The Songlines and In Patagonia, and knew he, too, was an archaeologist, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with his outlook on travel. However, I hadn’t realized just how much his anthropological knowledge was informed by the study of nomadism and hunter-gatherers.

While I agree with nearly all of Chatwin’s observations on our inner urge to travel and the downsides of not doing so, I’m left questioning the notion that travel is the sole salve to the age-old problem of human restlessness. Yes, there is a profound discrepancy between how we are living now compared to how we lived nomadically for the vast majority of human existence. However, when we reorient our attention to travel as a means of appeasing our restlessness, we see there may be more hope of appeasing our itchy feet after all. We may think of this as the anatomy of travel.

Despite the desperate wishes of many of us to be out wandering the world, most of us cannot always be traveling. Travel opportunities often come in temporary interludes of life and therefore cannot be the only solution to our modern unrest. We may notice that, after a while, as Chatwin pointed out, regardless of where we find ourselves on the map, an uneasy creeping sensation soon moves in once we’ve landed and wandered around our new place. Before we know it, we have itchy feet once more for home or someplace else on the map. Thus, traveling can only appease restlessness for so long and so we must search for additional activities and mindsets to quench our restlessness.

Anatomy implies parts of a greater whole. To begin with, we have to examine the constituent and interrelated parts of traveling or what aspects of traveling directly appease our restlessness. The results of traveling under the best and most meaningful circumstances do four fundamental things for us. A lot has to do with novelty, the freshness of newfound experiences. Whether traveling abroad, taking an excursion through a national park, or wandering around a state or local park, we’re on the hunt to expose our minds to something new. Secondly, we are excited by movement. Our evolution suggests we have been a migrating species for a very long time and are thus compelled to move. Traveling satiates this urge.

Discovery is a third embedded feature of travel—one in which we expand our view of the world, other people, and ideas. Whether we are in conscious pursuit of some new knowledge or stumble upon it haphazardly, our minds are often fixated on what the wider world is up to, and being somewhere else allows us a unique opportunity to be fully present. Lastly, escaping or breaking away from the staleness of our humdrum routines allows for newfound opportunities for relaxation, self-reflection, or rejuvenation we otherwise cannot always seek under normal conditions. Humans are not meant to be repetitive creatures, repeating the weeks until we die. We require respite, and travel can often satisfy this need.

When we break down travel this way, we begin to see that novelty, movement, discovery, and escape are the salient features that appease our restlessness, not travel in and of itself. Travel does not automatically reveal these features; they must be sought after while traveling. The question then is, can these same elements be obtained right where we are? Can we inculcate novelty, movement, discovery, and escape into our daily lives without needing to travel far and wide?

A consideration of the practice of mindfulness reminds us, we are only always right where we are. We are never somewhere else “over there” or “halfway around the world” but always right here, in this moment. This way of thinking can at first be frustrating to wrap our heads around because it can sound nonsensical or perhaps commonplace. However, given some practice in seeing this perspective, I believe we’ll see that it is the only way of framing our reality and can be quite the revelation and a great source of contentment for those of us who’ve been plagued by restlessness or thought that extensive travel was the only way to appease such restiveness.

In some sense then, traveling is not the fix to our restlessness after all—it is the novelty, movement, discovery, and occasional escape that is lacking in our lives that is the source of our restlessness. We have to break up our routines and fill them in with meaningful activities that satisfy these features of travel like mortar in a brick wall. For me, my week is filled with hobbies and activities that bring me novelty, movement, discovery, and escape–Jiu Jistu, running, reading, writing, evening walks with my family, and living vicariously through my three-year-old son as he learns to explore the world with infinite curiosity. These things and more stave off my restlessness and provide me with a peace of mind I thought was once only achievable through travel and adventure.

If we search and find what abates these underlying causes of our anxieties, we may just find that we can transcend the anatomy of our restlessness wherever we find ourselves and that we are not condemned to be in a perpetual state of restiveness. We have to mimic that which travel offers us to stave off restlessness.

Extensive traveling demands a lot from most of us in the modern world. Finances, family, careers, and many responsibilities keep us tethered to a single place for most of our lives. Thus, most of us must find alternatives to travel being the sole source of relieving restlessness. I’ve always favored the term wandering over travel because it can apply to travel and adventure far and near, physically as well as mentally because wandering is less an act and more a state of mind. As I wrote in Adventure as a Mindset,

“Adventures need not be elaborate or exotic, distant or remote, life-threatening, or foolhardy. Neither are adventures necessarily something solely entitled to the extreme risk-takers of the world or the well-to-do elites. They can simply be in the backyard, your hometown, the next county over, a neighboring state, or virtually anywhere that changes our perception of something.”

While I am in overwhelming agreement with most of Bruce Chatwin’s musings on travel, I believe he may have been mistaken by the idea that he was condemned–as in some Greek tragedy–to be in a perpetual state of restlessness and that only travel could momentarily appease this feeling. Might the perceived solution to our restlessness sometimes be misplaced? Perhaps our attitude and perspective are the things that require shifting, and not so much placing our bodies in different geographical locales—although that is perfectly acceptable and encouraged as well. Wanting and chasing more experiences is all well and good, but ultimately, if we cannot discover contentment wherever we already are, then we will not find it anywhere else.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB