Within
January 10th, 2023
I can travel very far and still be right within the borders of the city I live in. And it is not a big city, it is not a sprawling metropolis like Tokyo, Mexico City, or New York City where a trip from Washington Heights to Far Rockaway takes a lot of planning and an experienced and hardened soul to even attempt. I traveled far within narrow borders of my localized home ground and experienced new surprises every time I remembered to keep my eyes open when moving. That is important — because sometimes I move around without looking at any surroundings, just keeping my sight on the path ahead. When I do that, I don’t really travel, I just experience the distance between two points. The distance itself is not connected to traveling at all, it is just an annoyance to be ignored before getting to the destination.
When traveling and having my eyes open a striking realization often comes to me. Nature doesn’t change and there is no starting or end point in nature so it is not possible to travel through it. All that changes are the visuals which by definition are artificial and unimportant except only as an aesthetic experience. The identity of nature stays the same everywhere we are — nature is beyond us, beyond our understanding of it, and is completely indifferent to us and our plans and actions. We cannot, therefore, travel through nature. All the experience for travelers comes only from the change within, from the expectation of being somewhere else and that somewhere else is undefined and always just beyond reach. Travel is nothing else but personal growth and all personal growth is travel — within.
Traveling is not oriented on my destination, when I reach the final point that is not the end of my being a traveler. It is only one phase, the travel doesn’t end with reaching the destination. The role of the traveler is ongoing and not depending on reaching any place, that is only a preparation for another stage. And traveling is not a point of overcoming any distance — it is only a way to discover the distance. That distance makes travel possible but distance is not the length you can measure — it is in reality the true difference between objects or points. Distance is a separation from the known, and sometimes one step can feel like a whole expedition into the unknown.
And if we cannot tell the story about our travels, we haven’t traveled at all. I try to memorize my travels and create a map for future use.
