On Travel

There is a seductive falsehood advanced by Hollywood that an entire life is decided in a single moment. A moment in which a stand is made, a course of action decided, all things thrown to the fates. This is the moment everyone in the audience is waiting for, because it's precisely the moment we all wish we had the courage to manifest in our own lives. It's a moment in which a movie character feels - if only briefly - free.

But a movie is at best a rough compression of a life's story, and earning a sense of freedom outside of a movie theater is difficult at best. You might very well enact a dramatic moment of your own - quitting your job, kissing that girl. You might then experience a brief moment of creative and revelatory power in which you feel the boundaries of your existence slightly redrawn. But then what?

You get bored, and you call upon yourself to do it all over again. And repeating yourself is too easy, so you have to do something more new, more difficult.

What I'm saying is that quitting your job is not enough. It's, as I've learned, only the first step of a very long job. Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage: "To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed."

The most important thing I've learned from this trip is that the process of confrontation can never end. By confrontation I mean directly facing that which scares you, that which discomforts you, that which you do not know. In a sense, I must summon the same nerve required to quit a day job, and deploy it again and again and again.

There were so many times on this trip when I was one word away from missing some of the most intensely new experiences of my life. That word would be one of the most common: no. I could have turned away from the peak at Moon Hill. I could have declared it too hot to go biking in Yangshuo. I could have shunned the inherent cheesiness of a bamboo raft ride down the Li River.

The simplest example I can give of a necessary confrontation is my willingness to make a complete fool of myself in a foreign culture, by slaughtering the local language and customs. How simple it is to buy a pair of shorts in Los Angeles. To buy them in Yangshuo, however, requires one to question every assumption one has about nature of transactions and one's relationship to them. I have to get a receipt stamped somewhere else, and I leave the shorts here, and huh?

This is a confrontation one can easily avoid: just buy all shorts in Los Angeles. But there is something valuable I discovered about buying shorts in Yangshuo, something I find valuable in all my traveling experiences: the recovery of senses and faculties that are all too rarely called into action. Foremost among them: a willingness to get lost, to screw up, to stumble into something new and unknown. But also: the ability to constantly head into confrontation, and feel stronger for it.

For me, travel is ultimately a series of small adventures that beckons, awaiting your answer to its repeated call. I have invoked Hayao Miyzaki repeatedly on this trip, and it's because his films proclaim a simple truth that bears repeating: we are all children wandering into the woods, hoping to find something new.