Reader Questions: August 2010 Archives

I'm just back from a couple weeks in LA, hanging with some of my magazine friends. Cruising through Malibu, walks on Santa Monica beach, shopping in Beverly Hills, and lunch on Sunset Blvd. 

Ahh, LA, you've got it all: a warm breeze, a coastline kissed by waves, fast cars and beautiful girls, and vast stretches of desert just over the next hill. That's a place I could spend a lot of time in...

But hey, there's work to do, and I know you folks are itching for more blogs. I'm on it. In the meantime, let's look at another reader question...

Ben from Venice Beach wants to know:

What is the major attraction for you when it comes to travel? 

I think it would have to be that burning curiosity. To see things for myself, to catch a glimpse of how people live in strange places, how they see the world, to discover what that splotch on the map really looks and smells like up close. The more obscure the place, the more I seem to be interested in it. Kira Salak put it well when she said: "[I travel] to see what cannot be imagined, to be taken into my dreams."

Travel is also a sort of compulsion. Whether I like it or not, that urge builds and builds until it's impossible to resist picking up the pack and starting again. It's in the blood, I guess.

Clive J. from the UK asked:

What do you know as a result of travel the rest of us don't?

I think the most important lessons are things we forget in the day to day, not things we don't know. 

When you're cut off out there on the road, the everyday frivolity of life at home - office politics, the rat race, "noble" ambitions, catching every episode of some stupid TV series - it all falls away until you're left with that pure, radiant core. You come to realize very quickly what is truly important to you. Traveling light, with all your necessities boiled down to what fits into your bag, you also realize what little you need to survive and what little you need to be happy. 

The road also teaches you to understand social networks and the way in which images and personas are shaped. You see the larger perspective, or the omniscient view perhaps, because you exist outside of the social structure of the places you're traveling through, and as such you aren't governed by their rules of conduct. You can act in a place without being a part of it. You're treated in a manner that doesn't reflect your past, your background, your accomplishments or your social status, a manner that only reflects the "you" that you present at that moment. It's incredibly revealing.

As for added knowledge, travel does give you a perspective on the wider world. It seems obvious to say it, but you realize that your philosophy and the philosophy and moral code of your culture doesn't apply everywhere else. People live differently and they get along just fine. The harshest culture shock is the one you experience on returning home. It causes you to question everything and to reject some of what you'd always taken for granted, foundational beliefs of your culture and your society. You come to realize what shaky intellectual ground we are all actually standing on.