Dear People,

I think this is the first entry I’ve ever written that is a direct response to someone else’s question. It is also something I’m sure others have considered. BC Rogers made me think about it again the other day in an email and I feel I owe him and some others an explanation.

If I have such an issue with the work/consume attitude, do not share the American obsession with productivity, think we’re often being scammed and told half truths by our government and find most people to be blindly unquestioning of the status of their lives….then why don’t I pack up and fucking leave??? I’ve done it before and obviously miss traveling. It is almost as if I am whining and lack the nerve to go. Everyone hates a whiner….even me. Why am I still here?

I have a gut feeling as to why I haven’t left, but I’m not sure if I understand it well enough to say it in words, but here goes:

Yes, my past does haunt me. Yes, I miss travel. But that does not mean I want to or should return to it.

When soldiers come home from war they have a hard time re-acclimating to regular life. This is not soley because they are scarred from killing foreigners. During war life is very intense. Everything is meaningful. Things happen in a flash and the stakes are high. You live forever wrapped in the moment because it is so important.

Regular life in the US pales in comparison. It is simply hard to get motivated to trudge through another day of work, or worry about dinner parties or office politics when you think back on what your life was once like….no matter that it was good or bad….just that it was once intense and meaningful. How can a daily routine ever compete with life at high volume??

I know I am not a soldier. I know the analogy is not completely valid, but it is real nonetheless. Reality TV stars complain about the letdown after the cameras stop rolling. Actors and performers speak of the rush of being on stage. After their careers end professional athletes can sink into depressions that last for years. All of them speak of missing the game. They miss that feeling.

Travel is like that. Nearly all travelers experience withdrawl after they go back home. Re-acclimation is extremely difficult. Depression is very common (something I have thankfully avoided). I know this not from any scientific studies, but from conversations with real people.

You see, travel is like a drug…actually, no. Travel is a drug. You become addicted to the next place even when the next place is no longer the source of pleasure it once was, but merely a way to alleviate the anxiety of sitting still. The estrangement from your former life can only be escaped by continually starting a new one.

Like a drug, travel resembles life, only more intense. It is the source of your pleasure and the absence of it is the root of your pain. The more you travel the less normal life offers you, which in turn further distances you from your previous life, which makes you more alienated, which can only be soothed by more travel.

Like a drug, it escalates. You must always do more of it, to more remote places, for longer periods of time, with ever higher stakes to experience the wonder you once felt just drinking a bottle of cheap red wine overlooking the Seine watching Paris at night.

Like a drug, you long for it. You tend to forget the lonliness and remember the endless string of new and interesting people. You forget the shitty beds and restless sleep in favor of waking to a croissant and expresso looking forward to discovering a new city. You tend to forget being lost and hungry wandering around the new city and remember when some local takes pity on you and shows you a great dive restaurant then takes you out for the evening at a club that used to be a castle dungeon. You forget getting robbed of everything you have and sitting misreably at a dirty police station trying to file a police report in Spanish and remember flying to Mallorca to ride scooters with an old friend. Like cocaine addicts, you remember the rush of the hit, but forget the 3 days without sleep.

And finally, like a drug there are withdrawls. I experience those withdrawls and long for it at times, but the cure is not to take more of the drug.

Although travel is a drug, that is not the only reason I choose not to leave. After all, drugs destory your life and wreck you body. Travel does neither of those. If I chose to remain an addict so to speak, life would go on. I don’t think I would require an intervention. After all, we all chase feelings. We are all addicts to something.

The decision to stay is about a choice: Seize the Day or Seize your Life. They are not one and the same.

Travel is so immediate. It is a lifestyle for the young and unattached. It is romantic and lonely. But life can’t always be about living in the moment. To forever seize the day is a false grail. Some goals necessarily take longer to achieve, a better commitment.

Is life just a series of unrelated experiences to be gobbled up or do you want your life to be about something, to tell a meaningful story??

Shall I die saying I ate life till I burst, sailed the seas and trekked the deserts, that I loved deeper and lost more on distant and foreign shores than others even imagine, or shall I say I helped my neighbors become better people, contributed what I could to the human condition through my work, loved my wife and family all I was able, and left my children with an opportunity to surpass what I was even able to dream??

That is the choice.

It is not a rhetorical question. It is not as if there is no reward for being the moth to life’s flame. There is certainly value in coveting all you can of life. But seize the day and you remain forever a student of life, never its master. Understanding why that is true is a very hard lesson.

I have largely lived the first option. The romaniticism it holds for most people is understandable, but the bullfighter dies alone. That is what they don’t see.

I choose the second option; not necessarily because it is better, though it may be, but because I have not yet tasted its secrets. I believe we can do better, but building something better for tomorrow isn’t a result of living life as if today is your last.

Of course I really want it all. I want both tomorrow and today. And in a sense that is what I am getting. I have eaten life for long enough. It is now time to grow something.

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13.11

Not to say I will never travel again. I have never believed that one cannot eat their cake and have it too ๐Ÿ˜‰

One Response to “The bullfighter dies alone.”
  1. Peter Bauman says:

    I think the relationship to your thoughts and mine are so interconnected it is ridiculous. Even as distanced as we have become and how littel time we have spent together in the past years. Just like in Holland in our Shakespeare class. Our thoughts and drives were similar, though our ability to articulate this differed and our path of obtaining this goal also differed. I had the exact conversation you just wrote with a woman last night for about 5 hours. I even spoke the same words and had not read your journal. I said,”It is an addiction”, and she grinned. I went on, “coming down off of that life into this life is like going through withdrawal”. She smiled as she too has and still does suffer from the estrangement and dullness of an ordinary life.

    Her story was incredible. Travelers don’t fuck around in conversation. They don’t have time to. Therefore within hours you know a fellow traveler at a depth that takes years to acheive with someone else. Sometimes this depth can never be achieved.

    Our conversation opened.

    “What are you writing a book about”, I asked. She grinned, “The conflict in the Balkans”. Why? It’s a long story she said. I was living with refugees in Bosnia helping them to survive. NO, I said, start from the beginning.
    Well she said, My 2nd husband and daughter died. I was a 40 year old widow living in America trying to find a way to grieve. It was impossible. I tried every way to break through the walls of depression. YOu were in a bubble I said, “Yes” She grinned.

    So a friend called me and asked if I wanted to do relief work in Croatia. So I went for a short trip. This was how she overcame her loss. The suffering and resilience of these people was so much more then her experience that she was able to think outside of herself, grieve, and find purpose and meaning in life. Something very difficult to do in American society.

    So, Elliott you ask what happens to the traveler when they stop. Well, the one’s that I have met who decide to stop and choose the path which you are taking usually change the world in there way. They are unable to live life the same way after witnessing what they have witnessed. So they make a choice. They can either continue taking the drug of travel and the search for paradise or they can stop and make the place they are from a better one.

    Typically these people go through a dark period. depression, reflection, however they choose the rehash, reflect on, fight negativity, apathy, meaninglessness, in the search for a true, meaningful existence. But, during this dark period glimpses of light begin to shine through and the Super-human power, the larger then life persona found in traveling is then transferred into the every day existence and suddenly the impossible becomes possible and the mission of that person’s life is to create the world they seek instead of searching for it.

    I will end with a great quote by Camus.

    “It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are far from our own country…we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to teh protection of old habits…At that moemnt we are feverish but also porous so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity.”

    Much Love,

    Peter

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