The answer to our titular question may seem self-evident. It is certainly a question that has been posed many times before, and as such, its asking may seem largely redundant. Why travel? Why not travel? If the time and money are at one’s disposal, if the inclination is gnawing away, why not board bus, boat or Boeing, hit road, ocean, rail or trail in search of adventure and experience new? The world and life are there to embrace. Other people, places and cultures can only broaden one’s appreciation of the absurd tragicomedy we are all actors in. Tolerance and understanding will germinate inside ourselves and an enlightened world citizen we each will become. Such is the justification typically given for embarking upon that which to the casual inquisitor or the concerned comrade seems to amount to nothing more than the foolhardy and even futile satisfaction of one’s own self-indulgence. But this seems only a partial rendering of the essence of our question, or rather, an adumbration of a more fundamental clarification.
Indeed, it seems that not just the desire, but the inherent need to travel, lies at the very root of the traveller’s being. It is a need born of a discontent which stirs his soul into a sort of sedentary sickness that only the tumult and upheaval of the commonplace that the itinerancy of an extended period of travel brings can – if not completely cure – at least soothe until its next arising. It is this discontent and the reasons for it that manifest themselves in all she does, from the vague notion that there must be more to this life than waking, driving, working, driving, sleeping, waking, driving, working, five days out of every seven, to a sense of utter alienation from one’s sense of self and the life one leads which only a prolonged spell of self-enforced exile from the source of this inner friction could come close to assuaging. To “find oneself” is how such a notion is ordinarily articulated. To step out into the comparative wilderness until our devils depart, until we have overcome our sickness and the intolerable situation to which it has reduced us and set off down the road that will lead us to our convalescence, that is the curative power of travel to he who is overwhelmed by the need.
This is no simple escaping from life. To take such a step into the unknown is not to flee from crisis as a substitute for facing it. Such a crisis will only lie dormant and fester until you return. Rather, to travel is to confront that crisis in itself. It is the head-on addressing of that which originated the aforementioned discontent through an active breaking free of the moorings that kept one tied to it in order that a more agreeable destination may be reached thereafter. There is, moreover, nothing cowardly in effecting such a move. There may, on the contrary, be no greater affirmation of one’s boldness than to gather every ounce of strength from every conceivable conviction and – for better or for worse – dive into life once more.
To travel is not to shrink from responsibility, it is more a recognition of the gravity of the task that lies ahead. It is an acceptance of liability for extracting oneself from the insufferable and a full-blooded assault on the world outside the safety of the everyday. It is the seizing of an opportunity that merely lay implicit in one’s general scheme of possibilities before the realisation hit that the only way that scheme will change is if we each step out and effect such change ourselves. Travel is escapism for sure but it need not always be reduced to a simple evasion of fate or the keeping free of one’s neck from some millstone or other. Nor does it come down in every case to a straightforward desire for experience for experience’s sake. Though this in itself is nothing to condemn. If we are to make the distinction between a simple desire and an existential necessity for travel, therefore, it is the traveller’s overcoming of himself by way of his travelling which must be brought to the fore.
It has long been said that life is the continual fashioning of one’s own being. We are not (for the most part) cattle, living simply to chew the cud from moment to moment with no thought as to why such futility should be our fate. We are cognizant beings for whom our being is an issue. Our past, present and future bear upon one another as aspects of our own becoming. We need not accept our lot resignedly with no hope of something better. Indeed, we may posit that “something” as the goal towards which our present and our future presents are directed. The possibility of transcending our current condition towards a projected present-to-come, in other words, is always, however implicitly, included within our general scheme of being. So it is with the need to travel.
The need to travel does not arise in a vacuum. It is not the result of absolute contentment with one’s situation. On the contrary, it seems, as we have noted already, that the need to travel arises as a result of a certain disaffection over which one must prevail. Granted, such disaffection may manifest itself in no more profound a manner than a twinging need for experience and self-development in order that life becomes more varied than the four grey walls of an artificially-lit office interior and richer than the insular existence of he who dare venture no further than the ring-road lest he be confronted by the terrifying world of the Other beyond. On the other hand, it may arise from a more acute longing for the wholesale rejection of the life that he who contemplates travel wishes to leave behind in favour of the new beginning he sets out to uncover. But all travel, in the intrepid sense, seems a certain striving for a surpassing of oneself and situation.
We may also grant that such a surmounting could be achieved without setting off half-way across the globe in wanton journeylust. But even delving deep inside yourself without decorating passport pages necessitates a similar stepping outside of that supposed self in order to contemplate your current lot. It requires a similar set of questions to be asked and a similar resolution of the problem to be sought. Even though no immigration control was troubled in the process there must still occur the movement from dissatisfaction to its eventual surmounting, a similar transcendence of one’s present towards a more enlightened future. The compulsion for travel, we may thus suggest, arises not simply from a desire to escape the humdrum for two weeks only to return with a tan and a handful of hackneyed photographs to make the whole ordeal seem meaningful, but more pertinently, as part of the process of one’s becoming that individual towards which one’s past, present and future can be seen as being oriented.
A holiday will only return you to the life you left those few weeks before, at least, no shift in your relationship towards the world and your own existence is likely to occur during a fortnight lounging lizard-like by a pool sipping strawberry daiquiris, though stranger things do happen. Maybe you will realise that the life you left is not how this thing has to be. But such a realisation was not that which your initial escape aimed at primarily. The traveller, in contrast, propelled by necessity out of familiarly and his zone of comfort, sets off in search of exactly such a revelation – this defining shift of self and situation – in order to become someone other, someone changed in his being, not likely to return until such change becomes apparent.
Travel is not just the cataloguing of monuments or landmarks seen, it is the process of transformation that the traveller sets out to achieve. Travel shakes you out of the torpor of the daily struggle, it disperses the clouds of monotony that have gathered and engulfed your everyday. Travel allows you to view the world as a child again, encountering the strange and fascinating, surprising yourself and being astounded by life. To encounter cultures so different from your own and yet to realise that in many ways the locals are little different to the folks back home; to stroll round cities that you never dreamed you’d see turning corner after corner being confronted by experience new; to talk football with a Finlander, get drunk with German tourists or flirt in bad Spanish with Maria from Madrid – tus manos muy precioso; these are the treasures of travel for he who is gripped by the need.
Travel is a removal of the cataracts that have encrusted your free being leaving you blind and paralysed in the face of possibility. It is the active transgression of those limits that had previously worked to keep the would-be traveller passively enduring. To put one’s being on the line for the sake of some transcendent self-to-come is to step boldly forward in search of more from life despite every pretext that would have you remain inert. Travel, in other words, is the disruptor of the familiar and the negation of constraints. It is the assuming of the responsibility for one’s own self-fashioning and an embracing of the freedom to determine the being we may each, in our own unique way, endeavour to become. Travel is life as glorious discovery rather than as living death. It is the affirmation of insatiable becoming rather than interminable intransience. Why travel? Travel because you must. Travel to live. Travel to be.
