On Travel
The point of travel, when properly done, is to be changed by it. Ordinarily, such passive phrasing is looked down upon, not only in writing but in terms of describing human change. It’s much better, say conventional wisdom and copy editors everywhere, to be active than passive. In travel, however, the passivity required is paradoxically creative and productive. More importantly, the passivity has to be practiced—an active passivity, one might say (and a term to be filed in the annals of oxymorons).
Perhaps a fitting place to start is to distinguish between travelling and visiting. Visiting is what the vast majority of people do the vast majority of the time. Hordes of ciphers traipse to wherever, changing only their location and filing away whatever travel guide/bucket list activities on their social media accounts and in the recesses of their minds to be regurgitated for the acquisition of sociocultural capital in future gatherings. It’s ephemeral existence, and living poorly done.
Travelling, by contrast, is altering your geography—that is, your space and place and time. (Time is an essential component of geography; don’t get me started. Just go with it.) When travelling you ask questions of wildly varying profundity and maybe you arrive at some concrete answers, but maybe not. The answers you do arrive at may be sweeping (e.g. I hate both people and selfie sticks in equal measure), get you killed or at least put you at risk of bodily harm if publicized (e.g. Roman pizza is better than Neapolitan pizza), be wildly self-congratulatory (e.g. no, I didn’t have to take that tour to learn about that place because I married a genius), generate little in the way of philosophizing (e.g. free prosecco makes flight delays less bothersome), or be life-changing (e.g. I am willing to forgo thing X to attain freedom Y).
The point is that you’re allowing the world to change you, as opposed to stubbornly rejecting the opportunities to understand the world as it is and become a better version of yourself in the process. Travel allows not-you to alter the spaces and places that collate your life, as opposed to visiting, which perpetuates an intractable existence clinging to a comfort zone that was most likely dictated to you by someone else.
And so this tiny website is a catalog of my attempts, of varying levels of success, to travel. I promise no substantive contributions to anything other than the binary code living in my computer and on the internet, but I do hope that it is, at some point, interesting. For certain it will relay my thoughts on things. If only I can find the right sans-serif font.
