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My first big trip was to France. We ticked off the list of well known attractions: Paris, the Louvre, Montmartre, Versailles, Chartres, and Mont St. Michel. I felt awe in naming the places as if they were ancient gods. Which is fitting. Places have been linked to deities and holy sites for millennia. It makes a location more meaningful, but does in invest the journey with a higher purpose as well? Is travel a symbolic passage through life?
Perhaps, but I doubt symbolism is what passes through the average traveler’s mind when dealing with TSA. For the modern traveler, spiritual journeys are rarely the first reason given for a trip. Those who are already connected to the sacred do not need an article on making their travels more meaningful. But the rest of us continue to search for the reason we are lured away from home and friends into the unknown time and time again.
There is a multitude of ways to rationalize a desire to travel. You can pick or create a list of worthy sites and then work relentlessly on crossing each and every one of them off. The highest peaks, UNESCO heritage sites, the Seven Wonders, national parks, natural phenomenon, many possibilities abound. Does completing a list of visiting every country in the world imbibe the journey with a higher meaning or just exhaust you? Would you find yourself at the end feeling empty and realizing you’d lost the purpose along the way?
After my trip to France, I saw travel’s objective to be along the list category. I wanted to see the sites whose names were formed from ancient languages: Timbuktu, Marakesh, Katmandu, Machu Pichu. I created a list of places heard about while a child, infused with daydreams, and started with those. I enjoyed every trip but not all equally. To my surprise, sometimes it was the side trips to destinations I had never considered that lingered in my mind.
A cruise to the Caribbean where we were shepherded around like prized livestock made a deep impression. Why? Because my husband and I spent a majority of our ship time talking to the Indonesian crew. Four months after the tsunami, their stories and life aboard drew us in while diners with white upper class passengers did not. When I started looking for it, this thread held true for many journeys. The ones that stand out are the ones where I unexpectedly met another person.
What is it about meeting someone for what is likely the only time that cuts through the everyday masks we wear? Between the time when two eyes connect and you make room at your table, a barrier dissolves and unrehearsed personal stories emerge. Our lives cross and we connect, altering one another’s journeys however slightly by the gravitational force of emotions and experiences we never would share back home.
The story told is one that could never be understood except by a fellow traveler. It is almost always a story about a time you hit a wall and reached what you thought had to be the limit of what you could do. The time you were soaking wet, broken down, out of food, money and luck. And then as you teetered on what felt like the edge of all you were, you pushed a little further. The pieces were picked up, luck gave you a brief smile, and kindness was reciprocated. You were left newly born within an internal landscape thought non-existent before that trip, before that moment.
Why do we feel the need to travel a third the way around the world to tell such a story in broken translations? Because unless you have gone on such a journey, you could never understand the underlying emotion even if you were speaking one another’s native tongue. And if you have had such an experience, the emotion of the journey itself in a common language bridging cultural barriers. It affirms life and kindness and creates significance out of the chaos of everyday.
In the end, what makes travel meaningful is finding the moment that cuts into the essence of who we are while touching someone else in the same way. It is not the destination. Now when asked where I want to go, I’m much more laissez-faire. No one can predict when that moment will happen. A meaningful journey, one that will be remembered for years, leaves us altered somewhere in our soul. The trick to finding it may be to leave room for the unexpected.
