The Search

One of the reasons I travel, and I suppose many others, is to gain perspective on things. What things? I couldn’t tell you. Each man, woman, kid, grandma, hippie, backpacker and seaman has their reasons. Are we even conscious of these explorations? Are we actively searching? Or are we going along, picking up dust along the way? Bits of pieces of people, places, food and quick brushes on the sidewalk. Whether conscious in our search for perspective, identity, meaning and purpose in our travels we all share the same drive: seeking the new. The unseen. The un-thought-of. And, in the new and completely un-thought-of, we seek our own answers. Barry Hannah’s ‘Even Greenland’ is a masterpiece of short fiction that shows us the meaning of true experience.

Something new means something to all travelers, in a physical sense of travel and emotional sense. One of the things that I have come across in many diaries and journals of travelers is the search for identity. The search for the facets that make up the colorful array of the people we are. Part of the concept of identity in travel is how one is perceived and how ones perceives oneself. One then may beg the question of the validity or necessity of identity after all if it is nothing but a perception. But, cultivating one’s perception into a reality, a concrete set of values, beliefs and actions is the real work and most rewarding and I believe is the reason most travel.
After reading about the fragile sense of belonging and being entertained by the hierarchies and perceptions in travel and the contempt we travelers can have in our hearts for others trampling on our turf, I couldn’t help but think what a bunch of self-serving, ego-centric bunch we are. We travel mostly for our own gain. Traveling in and of itself, for the sheer purpose of traveling, regardless of our mission, i.e. reworking our worldview, embracing new cultures, people, ideas–caresses our egos and makes little reasonable sense.

I cannot tell you how many blogs I have read where the traveler meets someone, usually in the third-world, where the concept of travel for travel is incomprehensible. Why? they say. What do you seek? Work? No. A wife? No. food? No. What do you seek? And the explanation becomes a difficult one. We are then left with explaining our travels as one can interpret as reasonable as far as reason goes. Something easy. Something that makes sense in the logical order of things. A concrete answer.

John Steinbeck summed it up nicely in his book, Log From the Sea of Cortez.

“‘Then what do you search for?’ And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know that they search for such things too. We say to them, ‘We are looking for curios, for certain small animals.’”

And to the people they are speaking to, this seems reasonable or at the least, logical.

Here one feels the struggle of understanding. We must always understand that the search for meaning is not simply that of the traveler but to understand, to truly feel, the man that lives, breathes, sweats his cultures, his heritage, his sons, his daughters, his life, his pains and joys.

One of the most ignorant things a traveler can say about a third-world citizen is that they do not want. That they are happy with what they have. Of course they want. Their wants may not be our wants, but they want. Humans want. To survive and to say to their fellow man, here it is, the thing that will make us better. And what is the want? Is it health? Is it children? The ability to bear children? The plow with which to sow? For many travelers these may seem like basic needs. From my experience, especially in regards to health, they are wants. They want to be healthy but, working, making money to feed the family is a priority, sickness be damned. Many want and seek the health of their children. Who does not want this? This is an ingrained basic human instinct. They too, are searching.

Conversely, in travel, what can we make of the volunteer, the social worker, the service-learning members? The difference here with volunteers and travelers is a knife-edge thin divide. To seek true purpose and meaning one must look into oneself about the nature of the endeavor. For the volunteer who seeks out the deepest reaches of the jungle to join a tribe and deliver to them fresh drinking water, walks out of the jungle and never breathes a word about his service to anyone is different from the volunteer who puts on his display of work for man to behold, not for the benefit of the served, but his own. These are of course starkly black and white, because the volunteer who publicizes for the benefit of the people and works with his hands buried, figuratively but often literally, in the dirt, falls obviously in the middle somewhere. It is then very important to determine within oneself the true reason for helping. And hopefully, in helping, in volunteering, the understanding and respect becomes mutual.

Understand the ego in oneself. What is the want from the soul? The heart? Understand what it is that one searches. Travel is a thing which to most man does not make sense. And, for something to not make sense, makes the traveler unreasonable and sometimes appear, unfortunately, completely loco.

We seek the new, the wild, the experience. For what? For whom? Whom do you wish to understand? Is it oneself? Or the man with the crutches sowing seeds on the mountainside raising his son who has lost his legs to infection? Or both?
Do we change our way of life when we return home? If at all. Change the definition of home? Do we take in to consideration the lives of the people we sought to understand, to relate to? There are questions and there are always answers hiding in the remotest of villages, the saddest faces of children, the joy in a midnight dance in a plaza, the satisfaction of catching the fish that becomes dinner and the simplicity of being in awe. Seek and find. If there’s nothing to be found, then there’s no one or anything to blame. We are all different, and that, fellow travelers, is the beauty of it all.

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