Moving about
Been thinking about travelling again. Nothing to do with English, of course ('Journey' ew), probably more because I've been wandering around a lot and also Lin going overseas and such.
Before we flew everywhere so easily, there was at least a sense that you had to cover all the ground between one place and another to go there. On foot, by horse, it is constantly apparent, every inch of land is covered, every obstacle is physically felt, and whether or not you take it in or attach any significance to it, a traveller would see everything along their way. In a cart or by ship, it's less so (you can sleep) but still pretty obvious that to go somewhere you must go through everything as if you were walking, just at a different pace or more safely.
You can fall asleep in a car, but likewise, you could walk the same journey. Car trips can be surreal though - you could sleep the whole time, and the surrounds go by too quickly to be noticed in depth, and you can't hear or feel the air.
Flight is the weirdest. Kilometres disappear at a rate you can't really think about, and so all this space between just disappears. The fact that one city is a certain distance from another is immaterial, because it just becomes so many hours by plane. The space gets reduced to time.
I don't know what this means. Does it make people unconnected to actual distances? Is it somehow cheating? Probably not. But people used to go on cruises and so on for the sole purpose of travel, constant movement. Places and experiences and destinations were of course of interest as well though... so perhaps we're just affirming now, more conveniently, that all we really want is another place, another experience, and not really travel at all. Travel is actually just how we think about continual change of landscape, and isn't that merely replacing one place with another? And my wondering about how we do so... I guess you just change place on a smaller or greater scale, whether you walk or fly or whatever. It probably doesn't matter.
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Had to take 20 minutes out of social time today for sleep, that was a little weird but not overly disruptive (besides the people I hang out with are cool, and Jarrah kept an eye on me).