Travel Light: The Metaphysical Post
This is the first in a (at least three part) series of posts on teaching English in Korea.
When I told one of my closest friends I planned on moving to South Korea, her first reaction was to call me crazy, her second was to say: "People like you don't do that." That's when I knew I was making a good decision.
Travel’s not the answer. It’s too easy to travel and never leave one’s comfort zone, to stay on the tour bus, going from sanctioned tourist site, to sanctioned restaurant, and back again. The comfort zone never breached; the new experience never encountered except within a sanitized boundary where it can be limited, made safe, and consumed.
Travel can become an inoculation against having an open mind. We can see the world and remain as mired in our own preconceptions as before. Possibly even more so: “Been there, done that. I’m glad I don’t have to live there.”
The real answer is to get beyond the comfort zone. To go beyond one’s assumptions and safe spaces and enter that area where the boundaries aren’t fixed and there’s no scaffolding supporting our preconceptions. A space where we’re likely to grow but we’re also likely to get burnt.
It can be painful to watch our preconceived notions crumble beneath the weight of their own unsupported crufted-on bullshit.
Some people come away from the experience lessened, still attached to the broken pieces of their assumptions but unable to trust them again. Bitterness and cynicism set in, and a wounded pride takes over. For others it can be a weight removed, a pressure done away with, not collapse but liberation.
The goal is not to travel. It’s not to have “adventures” or “see the world”. These can be too easily transformed into consumables, the stereotypical endlessly backpacking globetrotter. Rootlessness and the excitement of new places can be as deep a rut as the familiar treadmill. But the ruts aren’t deepest in our environment, they're deepest in our own heads.
Travel and living abroad are two ways to encounter the unknown. They’re not the only ways. Nor is the comfort zone to be made an enemy. Our desire for a place where we can feel safe is hardwired, but like much that’s hardwired, it can be made a luxury and abused. When that place starts to resemble a cage, we need to find our way out and stretch past its confines.
I used to haul around this Francis Bacon quote which I unfortunately can’t source but will nevertheless paraphrase: “One’s mind should be broadened to meet the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries shrunk to fit the narrowness of the mind.”
That’s the perspective required. Travel’s one way to learn it, but it’s not the only way.
(The painting's by Nicholas Roerich.)