Author: admin

The old saying immortalized by Robbie Burns (and then anglicized and bastardized by a host of others) is nowhere more apparent than when one travels. The best-laid plans often go awry whether mouse, man, or unsuspecting traveler. It is inevitable. It is also how good stories come into being. While it is not always possible to remember this in the moment, it is part of the richness of adventure.

Today was one of those days, for reasons large and small. I woke up at 3:00 am. I got up at 3:30 feeling a bit frantic. I unpacked and repacked my suitcase, consumed three cups of really strong tea, did the last of the laundry, sat down, and concentrated on breathing. I’m prone to panic in moments of transition, but usually a deep breath and a stern self-talk later, I’m all good. This morning I had to remind myself that with very few exceptions, everything was expendable. Aside from the inevitable paperwork that accompanies travel, my phone, my camera, and my credit card, everything else was just stuff. While I’m not brave enough to undertake this particular journey with just a backpack, I’ve done plenty of trips with a camera bag containing the obvious and a change of clothes. The trip isn’t about the stuff.

It’s about the guy at the terminal who shared an eye roll and a grin with me over a fellow traveler who clearly had the world’s worst sinus infection and a comparable attitude. It was about the elderly mother seeing her middle-aged son off. It was about the profusely apologetic taxi driver who seemed to believe he was single-handedly accountable for rush hour traffic. It was about the bus driver who patiently repeated instructions at every stop. It was about my lovely friend who drove me to the Dartmouth Coach. It was about arriving at the hotel intact and being greeted by a woman with a gorgeous smile. It was about drinking another cup of tea – kind of like parentheses around the day – that tasted more like stale coffee and was still almost satisfactory. And it’s about a clean bed in an air conditioned room.

Stuff can be helpful, but as often as not it’s a hindrance. Stuff has a way of controlling us. It demands upkeep, cleaning, repairing, organizing, and – perish the thought – dusting. Am I taking too much stuff? Probably. But it’s a lot less than my panicked self wanted to bring.

So plans went awry. And then they all came together. What will stick with me is the people, the feeling, and – if I’m lucky – not much stuff.

My earliest memories are of travel. I remember endless planes, endless cars, and a red VW bus named Rufus and later, a blue VW bus named Blufus. I remember having no sense of where I was or why I was there. We lead a vagabond life, shifting between enormous cities and tiny villages, across three continents with alarming frequency. While we moved with immense regularity – often annually – I never really knew the place in which I lived. I recall addresses, can draw the floor plan of probably fifteen or more houses, but cannot tell you what it meant to be in that place. There was a universal sense of foreignness.

Travel was something that was done to me rather than by me. As an adult, I have continued to travel, although less frequently and to destinations of my choosing. However, the quality of the travel experience has changed. It is no longer a frenetic event, inevitably parting with places and objects familiar and dear. It is no longer something that happens without warning (a choice of parents who seem to have believed it was more difficult for a child to suffer anticipation than to be caught unawares). Rather, it involves a deliberate attempt to embed myself in the culture of the place. I have no desire to be a tourist, although there are times when I unavoidably am. I just want to be. What does it mean to inhabit this space, at this time? What does it mean to be here, now, given the history and longevity of the culture and its people?

We live in an incredibly diverse world full of the gorgeous and the abhorrent. There is no better experience than that of ‘otherness’. It is not always an easy experience; we can feel both pride and discomfort. In fact, it is the contradictory experience of the alien and the familiar which makes travel so necessary to our understanding of the world. Ultimately, we see in the ‘other’ our own humanity, in all of its beauty and ugliness. We come to know ourselves better. Perhaps most importantly, we see that we are very much the same.