Overcoming A Hard Truth for the Aspiring Wanderer: Accepting the Fact We Won’t See Most of the World
As we age, we are confronted with many of our limitations and are forced to face hard truths. Coming to terms with the fact we won't see most the world is one of those lessons.
“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
-Toni Morrison
On a recent trip to visit friends in Michigan, I found myself staring at a beautiful world map in their living room. Nearly fifty magnetic pegs advertised all the places they had traveled so far. My younger self might have been filled with envy and anxious wanderlust as I compared my tallies with theirs and quickly realized I had not come close to matching their score. It struck me that I didn’t feel this way anymore. I wasn’t jealous or unsettled or eagerly swept up in a manic craze fantasizing about quitting my job to tramp the world as I did endlessly in my 20s when I’d stare at one of these maps, read Kerouac, or rewatch Into the Wild. At that moment, I was perfectly content with the knowledge that I likely wouldn’t see most of the world in my lifetime.
We can estimate how many places we can reasonably expect to visit with the remainder of our lives based on our current rate of travel. Making a few assumptions, like that we won’t hit the lottery or fall into a large inheritance early in life that allows us to become a globetrotter in our 40s, we can presume things will remain relatively constant. On average, I take three to four trips a year. If I live to 80 (which is a generous estimate based on family history), extrapolating out to the end of my life, I have about 135 trips remaining. However, I assume early retirement will also grant me a few more extended trips, so let’s go with around 150 remaining opportunities to travel in the cache. That seems like quite a lot, and in theory, I could likely visit a healthy number of places with those outstanding trips, but I think this tallying up of places sort of misses the point.
I still obviously love travel and expect to visit many more places throughout my life, but in the last couple of years of thinking and writing so much about the meaning of travel and adventure, the anxiousness to go, go, go has abated. The wanderlust is still there, but I don’t feel as though I’m in a rush to heed the urgency I once felt. I don’t feel compelled to fulfill the call of one of those coffee table books beckoning me to see those “1000 places before I die,” as if we need the specter of death to goad us into more anxiety-ridden decisions in life.
I’ve somehow settled into accepting this hard truth that often plagues many aspiring wanderers yearning to “see the world”: I won’t see most of the world. There’s no way I would have accepted such a notion in my 20s and would have certainly denied that and seen it as a challenge to defy. I thought I’d have a harder time accepting that fate, but surprisingly, I’m quite nonchalant about it lately. But why? What changed?
Gratitude for one thing. I’ve recognized how incredibly fortunate I’ve been to have traveled to all the places I’ve already experienced. For most of human history, people haven’t had the means to travel so frequently and as unencumbered as we do today. While the human species has certainly explored the world across the millennia on long migrations in our hunter-gathering days, occasionally ventured out on pilgrimages, and ships enabled a few adventurous risk takers to chart and cross the oceans on sea-going voyages, it’s only been in the last couple of centuries that unprecedented amounts of the human population could easily travel the globe using planes, trains, and automobiles. Thus, I am ever grateful to live at a time that enables me to travel with relative ease and at a modest financial cost.
However, more than this sense of gratitude is the realization that one can never see the world in its entirety to begin with. It is a fool’s errand and an illusion to think we’re able to somehow visit all the countries in any meaningful way. I reflected on this thought earlier this year in One Can Never Step Foot in the Same Country Twice,
Lately, this reorientation of my thinking towards slow travel, abandoning the bucket list style of travel, and learning to appreciate the novelty of existence has somehow magically quelled my insatiable appetite. I’ve found some sense of peace in knowing that I’m not going to see even a fraction of the world I dream of visiting, not only because of the limitations of finances, time, relationships, and responsibilities to uphold, but also because of the very liminality of existence. Seeing it all cannot be done, for it is an illusion. The minute the airplane wheels lift off the tarmac, the country we leave behind is already well on its way to becoming something new entirely, albeit subtly.
The practice of meditation and studying Eastern philosophy and Stoicism has also taught me something valuable and practical to appease what was once a lot of restlessness. As I shared in Anatomy of Travel: Staving Off Restlessness Requires a Shift in Perspective, Not Geography
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.
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.
Even if I do see those 1000 places before I die, there would be another 1000 places of equal value left unseen. It was always going to be the case that I would never see most of the world because the world isn’t a static entity after all. Time, humans, and the world are a process in constant flux. Perhaps it took too long to let go of my restlessness, but I am grateful to no longer feel the need to rush across the planet just to say I’ve been there. I will gladly accept whatever remaining opportunities are left for my travels and make the most of those trips.
As Emerson observed,
“It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.”
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-JSB
It's a good feeling to have, Justin, to be satisfied with what we've achieved, with what we've seen and experienced, and still to have the energy and desire to do more.
Interesting. I have no desire to see the entire world, but at age sixty-one, I do feel a sense of urgency to use my time as wisely as possible. For me, that doesn't mean seeing the "must-sees," like the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China, but as long as my health allows me, to live in different places, get up in the mornings and picking a direction to walk and see what the world is like where I happen to be.