The Meaning of Travel: Why People Long for Distant Places

The Meaning of Travel: Why People Long for Distant Places

Migration and exploration may not have been humanity’s original nature, but they were certainly conditions for our survival in the natural world. Our earliest ventures into the unknown were shaped by a mixture of fear and tension, curiosity and excitement, and, if we were fortunate, the rewards and satisfaction that followed. Over time, all of this gradually seeped into our blood, driving us to overcome fear, to climb one mountain after another, to cross one river after another. Like Buendía searching through towering mountains for the unknown Macondo, or like Columbus gazing across the boundless sea toward an imagined new continent.

Today, human footprints have spread across nearly every known part of the world. Unless we deliberately seek danger, travel is no longer an undertaking that requires risking our lives, nor does it demand extraordinary curiosity to overcome fear of the unknown. And yet, the original impulse behind travel may not be so different from the early condition of humanity. To a large extent, we still set out because we have grown weary of the present. People today may not depart as our ancestors once did, driven by desperate circumstances such as food shortages or dried-up water sources, but we are still troubled by a new kind of inescapable predicament. When a person is bound to the same place for too long by invisible ropes, the spirit begins to grow impoverished, even parched, and it too needs new food and fresh water.

But perhaps distant places are not so different after all. The faraway land you long for is merely someone else’s hometown, just as the ground beneath your feet is the distant place in someone else’s heart. Human lives vary in poverty and wealth, busyness and leisure, but in essence they are not all that different. As Alexandre Dumas put it, “There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.” What is often bound is not our body, but our spirit. A short journey may fill both body and mind with a sense of freshness, but that freshness is not a lasting force. I once read a study suggesting that the novelty brought by a change of environment lasts no more than a week.

Another difference from humanity’s earliest journeys is that today, before we even leave, we have often already booked our return ticket. We cannot put down roots in a place of lush grass and falling blossoms and build our own Macondo there. Still less can we ravage and plunder a new continent. And so the distant world cannot fundamentally transform our own lives. If we love the new place more than our hometown, then when we return, we are bound to carry back a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction. If, on the other hand, the place we travel to is barren and backward, we may already begin regretting the journey while we are still there.

Yet if people begin to realize that barrenness and desolation are, in fact, conditions that arise from within, and that spiritual abundance is more precious and enduring than bodily comfort, then even when one cannot keep the body forever on the road, one can still find fulfillment through a rich inner world. And if a person can keep their soul always on a journey of exploration, then even if confined to a tiny room, they are freer than most people in this world.

Travel is an important source of human vitality. Therefore, whether in body or in soul, do not be too quick to stop your steps of exploration.

“Most people die at twenty or thirty and are buried at eighty. After that age, they are only their own shadows, and the rest of their lives are spent imitating themselves—day after day, more mechanically, more affectedly, repeating what they did, thought, loved, and hated when they were alive.” — Romain Rolland