What's travel good for anyway

One of the great myths about travel is the idea that it does things to you, or enhances you in some way. You've probably read the quotes: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" (Twain); "Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled" (Muhammad); hundreds more, apocryphal and accurate alike.

I think this is all bunk.


It's not bad, and I think at its best, travel can live up to these sentiments. But this notion of travel is bunk for a few reasons, not least of which is that it rests on a foundation of often-ignored privilege. It's all well and good to lecture people that traveling would broaden their minds and teach them inclusivity and sophistication, but the reality is the single parent working two jobs far from any major airport isn't exactly staying at home out of lack of imagination or small-mindedness. To be clear: I think that people who can travel, who have the luxury of time and money, absolutely should. But let's start by acknowledging that it is a luxury of sorts.

The main reason I think these sentiments miss the mark, poetic and lovely and grand as they are, is that travel doesn't impart these qualities. Rather, travel is a superb reflector. It reflects the traveler back to herself, presents her with a wide platter of realities, and leaves it up to her to accept the growth, wisdom, flexibility, and understanding on offer. A traveler is just as apt to reject the offering, to retreat into his preconceived realities, and to bristle at his reflection rather than taking it in. We know this, I think, when we take a second to think about the loudmouthed tourists we've seen abroad barking at waiters and complaining about the culture, oblivious not only to their prejudices but to the reactions of those around them. We also see it in ourselves, in those moments of travel frustration when we just want a comfort from home, or when we let our impatience run away with us and start traveling thuggishly.

What travel does is show yourself to yourself in extremis, exposing you to uncertainty and newness at as rapid a pace as you can take it. You find that this culture doesn't "do" toilets the way you do. That this mode of public transit doesn't get where you want to go. That that bus sometimes just doesn't show up. That these people will suggest "intestines" as an alternative when you tell them you don't eat "meat." That you've booked the wrong nights and haven't got a place to stay tonight. That you must be mispronouncing the name of your next destination, because nobody knows where to send you. That this culture doesn't really know what to do with a solo diner. That all the food places in town closed at 8, not midnight.

Your reaction - or more precisely, your awareness of your reaction - is what dictates what happens next.

These moments throw up a choice, whether we're aware of it or not, to embrace the circumstance or block it out. It seems to me that it's most useful when we acknowledge the totality of the situation - to take a moment to let it be terrible to be stuck without dinner, to register how frustrating it's been to get where you're getting - and also to look at it from the outside. It's that tricky process of holding something gently, staying in touch with your reactions but open to growth. One of the better takes on travel I've heard is that "everything can be a great experience, or a great story, and ideally both." The active work of keeping this in mind - of walking around your situation and appreciating it from that years-on perspective even amidst disasters - can get you to some pleasantly growth-looking places.

And then of course, getting out of one's head (it's very easy and not at all a thing that I am constantly struggling to do, everything is extremely chill and good here all the time) and into the world again is the next facet of the challenge. How do you improvise? How do you let go of the things you thought were important? How do you MacGyver your way out of your situation? How do you stretch your sense of self, your sense of order, your sense of reasonable, your sense of geography, to fit the circumstances you're fortunate (whether you see it so or not) to have encountered?

This isn't limited to international or intercultural travel, obviously. One of my more cringeworthy memories of travel comes from a trip to San Francisco - not even my first! - and an impatient, idiotic, childish moment of pushiness and stress over a ticketing machine. I was thirty-three years old, an alleged adult, and I couldn't handle it. I was, in that moment, shut-down, closed-off, inward-focused to a keen and painful extremity. What travel reflected to me - what I didn't register for months - was a state of extreme and largely unacknowledged anxiety, unready to stretch after (and, eventually, before) a year of tectonic shifts (aren't they all). It was a real hard boiled eggs moment that spilled out in all kinds of toxic ways. Travel didn't miraculously expand me; it shone a spotlight on my raw, rough state of being. It telegraphed some major structural problems, but I wasn't ready or able to engage with that reflection until well after the fact.

All of which is to say: the window doesn't close. The process of travel can extend long after your trip does, as your memories and the lingering scars and badges fade into the patchwork of your life. The possibilities of travel are remarkable, as broadening and edifying as the cheerful quotes all suggest. It can reveal endlessly: ourselves to ourselves, ourselves to other cultures, other cultures to us. But it only can; it's only one possibility. It only reveals; your growth, or stagnancy, or self-involvement, or cultural edification, is yours.

All travel is friction. It's an immovable object and your traction across it can charge your cells or slow you to a halt. It's what you do with it that makes the difference.