I'm writing this from New Zealand, where I am traveling with Marie and (some of) her family for two weeks or so. Right now she is on a helicopter tour of Franz Josef Glacier, which didn't interest me enough for me to fork out the $200. Yesterday we visited a refuge where we saw some endangered kiwis. And so on. And so again I wonder, Why am I here? It's not to learn about kiwis, because I could learn far more about them from books or the Internet. So why?
I asked Marie, and between us we came up with at least one provisional answer: we travel in order to be inconvenienced.
Because travel involves a lot of headaches. It involves inconvenience on a massive scale. But that very inconvenience pulls us out of our comfort zones, out of the little bubbles of Habit that we build around ourselves as part of daily life.
When I get too far into a rut, it is as if I stop noticing things: stop tasting food, stop seeing colors, ... all because it is routine. That's not literally true, of course, but it becomes possible to answer the question "What's happening?" with "Nothing — just the usual." You can't do that when you travel because nothing is as usual. The food is strange, so you taste it. The sights are strange, so you see them.
Robert Pirsig talks about the difference between Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. We travel because the very strangeness of things breaks a hole through which we can see Dynamic Quality if we but look. In a sense, the inconveniences and nuisances are the point of the whole thing.
Sent from my iPhone
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