Yet Still, the Journey Lunges Forward
Categories: Off The Cuff“After spending all that time traveling half-way around the world, what have you learned?” Now, back in my temporary home in North Carolina, I lean back in my armchair and contemplate this important inquiry that I am so often confronted with since returning back to the US.
Trying to come up with some coherent response to this seemingly overwhelming and complex question, my head drifts back, eyes shut, and I think back to the past eight months on the road. All that comes to my mind, however, is a slide-show of warm and welcoming faces from the innumerable wonderful friends that I’ve had the pleasure to cross paths with on this trip.
Many differences are quickly apparent among this unceasing stream of people: different beliefs and customs, different languages, different forms of self-expression, different temperaments and personalities. I could go on and on with listing off the dissimilarities, but in sum, all of the differences are trumped by a unifying commonality: humanity.
Going back to our original conundrum, “What has traveling taught me?”
Through traveling and coming into contact with so many different types of people, I now better understand how similar in fact we all are. Through traveling, I have learned that we are all different peas stemming from the same pod, often with similar hang-ups, aspirations, fears and desires. Traveling has taught me to expand that circle of brotherhood, encapsulating not just immediate family and friends, not just the members of our town or the citizenry of a US or Europe for that matter, but rather that of all of humanity. In short, traveling has taught me to be human. It seems to me that the failure to grasp this simple notion—treating others as human beings—is at the heart of much of the misunderstanding, aggression, and strife that has plagued humanity throughout time.
Traveling has also taught me to not take life too seriously but at the same time stand back mouth ajar and awe-stricken by its miraculousness; to take whatever Lady Fate throws your way, run with it and never look back; to not just complain about all that’s wrong with the world today, but firstly to look at all the unifying themes, and to create a new culture if the prevailing one doesn’t suit you well. Most of all, traveling has taught me to seize every waking moment as an opportunity—an opportunity to learn, to grow, and most of all, to live.
By no means am I saying that traveling is a pre-requisite to the understanding of these traveler credos that I’ve put forth. Like the writer Dagobert D. Runes once said “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home”. Traveling with an inquisitive and open mind does, however, surely facilitates this process and fosters its development.
Probably not to the readers’ surprise, it has been an objective of mine to pique an interest of the audience in traveling and intercultural exchange through my entries. Many of us live in a society, the US, where only around 10% of us have passports, and due to a lack of intercultural understanding, a lot of us have dangerous isolationist and non-cooperative views of the world.
This is obviously an important topic, but a more central message for me that I’ve tried to convey, rather than generating an interest in just traveling, however, is to generate an interest in decisive action. If that decision towards action comes to fruition in deciding to quit your job or stop doing whatever you’re doing to make that extended traveling trip that you’ve always dreamed of, then power to you. But that’s just a tiny example of a much broader theme in that of taking command of the life that we live.
To me, it seems as though so many people live lives of mediocrity, burdened by an overhanging fear of failure preventing us from taking action to better position ourselves for the life that we desire. The mighty ‘f’ word—failure—plagues us, leaving us in a paralyzed ‘what if’ mindset, questioning our past decisions—or better yet lack of—and striving for certitude in our existences.
This deep-seeded fear of failure is a direct impediment to interpersonal growth and is one of the main reasons that as a species we’re so terrified of change and uncertainty. But if we really grasp the truism that failure is a mental construct—an internal representation of the world around us in that we create—and in reality there are just outcomes in which we can always learn something from, then what’s stopping us from leaving in the dust this life of mediocrity and achieving greatness?
We have all the tools right in front of us to forge greatness in each of our lives, however you may decide to define it; the problem lies in our obliviousness to the enormity of our potential power: specifically the grave misunderstanding of the procession of change which is at the heart of this human plight. The human mind has a lot of difficulty grappling with the inherent non-linear and asymmetric nature of change, and as such we are often fooled into thinking that the energy involved in invoking change should be roughly equal with that of the outputs or its effects. This view of change, besides for simply being incorrect, also fosters a mentality of complacency and passiveness in action, as well as creating a nihilistic view of the world in which we are all just powerless and static beings.
Fact of the matter is we are not creatures living in isolated vacuums, often tiny inputs inevitably will have huge far-reaching effects, and our actions do have an immediate impact not only on our lives but throughout our intricately webbed world and its history. Change often begets more change, and the mere decision to act reflexively changes us thereby further affecting the outcome. Now understanding this concept of change, the decision that confronts us is not whether or not we want to change the world—we inevitably are and will just by living in it and acting—we rather must decide on the magnitude and direction of our effect.
Here’s a personal example highlighting the far-reaching implications of decisive action in creating change. About four years ago or so, I decided for whatever reason to stop watching TV and to start reading everything that I felt would give me a better understanding of the world and that which would aid in making me a more evolved person. The direct cause of this decision I can’t recall, but obviously something triggered it pushing me over that proverbial tipping point towards action. Anyway, this decision was a pretty big commitment for me, because only a few years before that, in the middle of my sophomore year in college, I had just finished reading my very first proper book from front to back. Before that point, I just breezed through my education, doing the bare minimum necessary to do well enough, and I was able to manage to do that without ever fully reading any of the assigned novels.
Fast forward to today, where I’ve embraced a philosophy of change and its conduciveness towards growth. My decisions to go to graduate school in Spain, to head off into my travels through Asia, to start up this website; all these actions are manifestations of a philosophy that I have come to understand through the synthesis of ideas put forth by other writers interacting with my ever-changing experiences. As I am quite certain that my life would not have panned out the way it has without immersing myself in the books that I have met, that decision made four years ago set my life on a completely different trajectory. Additionally, the life trajectories of many of the people that I’ve encountered throughout the past few years have all been altered to some degree all as a direct result of that one decision that I made four years ago, while these same people will alter the life trajectories of many others indirectly through me, and those others affecting more and more others, and so on ad infinitum.
The point of this little anecdote is not to soothe any megalomaniac desires on my part, but rather to show the extraordinary effect we can, and often inevitably will have, on ourselves, our immediate surrounds, and even the entirety of the world, through our decisive actions. At any given time we can choose whether to be active or passive players in this game of life; we can choose how and how much of an effect we will have; we can choose the immortal imprints that we leave upon this world. The first step is just the decision to take action and the direction that you would like to take it, the rest is all just a continual re-writing of the history books. Through our actions, specifically actions through ideas, we can reach the plains of immortality.
In a similar spirit, even though this will be the last entry that I write for TND (for now at least), hopefully some of the ideas that I talk about, ideas which where borne from countless other thinkers’ ideas, may act as that same trigger towards positive action in some of your lives and might continue living onwards. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you, the reader, gained just a fraction of the satisfaction from reading the entries as I did writing them.
All the best till’ the next time down this windy road of life,
Tim
