Travel Broadens the Mind
OK, people talk about the obligations of mortgage and kids, and society expecting these things of you. In my own personal experience I’ve actually found the opposite; that the social pressures for me not to have a mortgage or kids are actually stronger than the ones encouraging me to. (I’ve spent a long time attempting to convince myself that in actual fact owning a home does not mean you become a dullard overnight, never mind the time spent trying to convince myself that I’m not a dullard in the first place.)
The expected obligation that I wrestle with is the one that insists that I must travel, and people who have not traveled do not have broad minds. Travel broadens the mind. If I don’t travel, then society/media/the man dictates that I am simply a dullard who hasn’t escaped the dominant social paradigm, but consuming travel could make a new exciting me with a broad mind.
I’ve found when I have travelled that mind broadening is difficult to come by for a natural introvert, and that I’ve broadened my mind less by traveling than by spending the last four years writing regularly to my penpals overseas (ok, I admit I’ve visited them, and found traveling that much more rewarding for knowing people who lived locally, but then I would have just been a tourist without the previous four years of writing), or by reading.
I’m reminded of the utter outrage I felt outside Westminster Abbey at the women who asked her traveling companion ‘What’s this building?’ and upon being told it was Westminster Abbey, her response was not to find out more, but rather ‘I may as well take a photo then - hold on, don’t take it until I’ve got my coat off, it makes me look fat’. And I thought ‘Fossil fuels are being extracted from the ground and combusted for THIS?’
So, how do I reconcile my desire to not destroy orangutans by flying to visit them with my desire to visit orangutans, with my feeling that unless I have visited them, I am not a worthy person, with my feeling that if I do visit them rather than watching a David Attenborough orangutan special that I’m somehow just being a consumer by wasting fossil fuels to see something that I can appreciate through TV? I don’t know. I suspect I don’t reconcile it in the same way that I don’t reconcile the need for meaningful work with having a career, or the expectation that if I work to live rather than living to work, there is apparently something wrong with me.
Thanks go to JAFW for the emails that inspired this rant.
The expected obligation that I wrestle with is the one that insists that I must travel, and people who have not traveled do not have broad minds. Travel broadens the mind. If I don’t travel, then society/media/the man dictates that I am simply a dullard who hasn’t escaped the dominant social paradigm, but consuming travel could make a new exciting me with a broad mind.
I’ve found when I have travelled that mind broadening is difficult to come by for a natural introvert, and that I’ve broadened my mind less by traveling than by spending the last four years writing regularly to my penpals overseas (ok, I admit I’ve visited them, and found traveling that much more rewarding for knowing people who lived locally, but then I would have just been a tourist without the previous four years of writing), or by reading.
I’m reminded of the utter outrage I felt outside Westminster Abbey at the women who asked her traveling companion ‘What’s this building?’ and upon being told it was Westminster Abbey, her response was not to find out more, but rather ‘I may as well take a photo then - hold on, don’t take it until I’ve got my coat off, it makes me look fat’. And I thought ‘Fossil fuels are being extracted from the ground and combusted for THIS?’
So, how do I reconcile my desire to not destroy orangutans by flying to visit them with my desire to visit orangutans, with my feeling that unless I have visited them, I am not a worthy person, with my feeling that if I do visit them rather than watching a David Attenborough orangutan special that I’m somehow just being a consumer by wasting fossil fuels to see something that I can appreciate through TV? I don’t know. I suspect I don’t reconcile it in the same way that I don’t reconcile the need for meaningful work with having a career, or the expectation that if I work to live rather than living to work, there is apparently something wrong with me.
Thanks go to JAFW for the emails that inspired this rant.