Dear Readers,

I’ve been doing some travelling as of late. Rang in the last year of the nineteens in a foreign country, surrounded by people with joie de vivre and a sense of present-living that I envy. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to think too much; the gentle folk I met on my trip seemed to live in the here and now, enjoying the moment, paying attention to what is in front of them. This could have been just my perception, as it’s a rare and patient individual who can actually pull off the Zen attitude. But my encounters with them got me to thinking about the nature of travel.

When I travel, I like looking at the people around me and gazing into their lives, if only for a short moment. I imagine and fantasize about what their world must be like and if I could do the same sorts of things with my own existence. Could I be an artist in Paris, a fruit-stand merchant in London, a café barrista in Seattle or St. Paul? What’s life like for that person? I am free to imagine the small details that make up a life anywhere. I can wonder, and I do, whether everyday existence is the same for those in other cultures as it is for me. Rather how it’s the same, and how it’s different. Whether I could cope with ten-foot snowfalls, cucarachas, or tornadoes every year, for instance. I wonder. From the window of a train, I see the smoke from fireplaces in houses I pass, and I wonder if the people inside are as warm and cozy as they look from my point of view. It’s a fleeting fantasy; the train passes quickly and soon so do those questions as I take in even more sights and wonder about other people’s times and places in the world.

Most people would say that they travel to escape, to "get away from it all," as if somehow all one’s everyday problems and concerns disappear when one is away from them. But there’s a bit of denial in that motivation. Isn’t it true that when you return from travel, you get hit full force with all of the same issues you stuck your tongue out at when you left? Vacation "letdown," that post-voyage malaise that sets in just about when you’ve settled back in to the first or second day of your everyday life, is for me the source of some measure of dread as I am on that return flight or on that homestretch of the highway returning from someplace new and wonderful. I have a good life but it’s hard to come back to it after being away.

And why is that? Here we come to the real experience of travel. When you’re away, you’re usually not around people that you see on your daily basis. You’ve left your work colleagues in their cubicles, you don’t have to deal with your in-laws, you’ve got no worries about the lawn, the car, or the gas bill. It’s all down to you, your traveling companion if you’ve got one, the money in your pocket, and your ability to cope with surroundings that are different from your own. Thus you can be more…well, yourself. Because you’re anonymous in a new setting, you can become precisely who you want to be, which can be anyone you choose. (Much like the online experience!) You can metamorphosize from computer geek to beach bunny, from academic to femme fatale, from wallflower to star. No one knows you when you travel; thus people are likely to accept at face value whatever personality you choose to put before them. And what a cathartic experience that can be! It’s not pretending, really…it’s more a putting-forth of that which you keep hidden most of the time. Maybe it’s this that causes the vacation letdown…the fact that when you return from a trip, you’ve got to put the mask of your everyday personality back on. For me, I know that’s the case. It would make more sense to keep going, to keep being on the road, to keep being truly me. But sometimes, the life circumstances of everyday existence, the networks of behavior and relationship that we’ve built up, don’t allow us to negotiate newer, truer selves. Hence the cage, hence the sadness and letdown of the post-vacation experience.

Travel gives one the chance to be with one’s self in the here and now. to be more truly and fully present within life. (There I go getting Zen again.) Mindfully letting moments and people pass before you can help you to envision more of what your own life can be. Seeing the potential for change and enhancement in your own world can be made more clear by watching and wondering about how others live their lives. I suppose one doesn’t need a ticket to Zanzibar to do that…the same thing can happen on the light rail during the evening commute. But travel enhances our senses and causes meditative retreat, or at least it can and is supposed to. Be more, be less, just be…that’s what travel is all about.

At any rate, I must leave you for this month…you see, I am at work but plotting…my next voyage. I’ll let you know what I find.

Feel free to comment on my rantings at pasionara@theminx.com.