Travel as a meditation

There are many who love to travel and many who don’t. As for myself I love nothing more and I find that travel can be very akin to meditation. Meditation of mindfulness, of impermanence and much more.

To be on the road… A village rises to pass away, a city rises to pass away.  Wonderful scenery passes before your eyes. You sit back and watch quietly, let the wonder of it fill your mind, but never try to hold on to anything, you know that it will pass away soon, but you don’t think about that. You are always in the present moment, always in appreciation of the vistas that have opened for you now, this very moment. It is easiest to find an anchor to the Here and Now, when you are travelling I find, that’s why every time I travel, I feel I am actually more at home, than I was while at home. It is a paradox- travel looks like you are moving all the time, like you’re distancing yourself from what you consider part of yourself- your familiar environment; but actually it is quite the opposite. Because you are free at that time to be the real you constantly, you are actually quite stable and always at home- in the here and now, in the truth of impermanence, in the wonder of being.

I have fallen in love with many places and sometimes it has been hard to leave a certain place. Yet it is  a very good chance to realise that travel is like life itself, we are always on the road to a new place, new experience, new state of being. When you feel melancholy and are short of mourning a loss of an important place where you have grown a lot, which you have loved so much, it is a perfect time to realise the impermanence of everything. Then no disappointment will arise, no thought even will arise to hang the keys to your heart on a specific wall, only to find that wall in ruins years after.

Travel can also be a teacher of equanimity. When we travel we are free of goals. We don’t know what to expect from new places because we have never been there. We approach each new place with an open mind and heart. And sometimes we may not like what we see. Many a times I have stumbled into a third world city that is a wreck, filled with poverty, unsanitary conditions,  and at first glance feels like not the kind of place I wanted to find. Yet this is the gift of the open mind state that travel presents to you. You came for the journey and not for the destination. You wanted to see and experience new places, no matter what you found. Some places are beautiful, some lack in beauty. But even in the latter- there is always something there, an experience, an encounter, a lesson, which in the end makes you glad to have ventured there. It might be the people you meet on the street, it might be your own compassion that you meet, it might be a lesson to let go of preferring beauty to no-beauty.

I once met an old mountain guide in a little mountain village in Morocco, who I still remember as the greatest teacher in my life. He hadn’t gone to school, he hadn’t read books. Yet he was wiser than anybody I had ever met before. Regardless of not being educated intelligence shot out of his eyes with a piercing force. What else shone out of his eyes was happiness. An incredible true peaceful happiness. It shocked me to see someone so poor, be so clearly happy. He simply wondered to our table in a little café along the road-side. And me and my friends sat talking to him and listening to him for a long time. He told us he didn’t own much anything, apart from what he had in his bag, he struggled to support his family at times. He had experienced the loss of several family members and his son to illness. Yet he told us he was the luckiest man in the world to be blessed to have the love of his wife and remaining children. He told us he was the luckiest man in the world to live on that mountain. He said he didn’t need anything else in the world, how he’d seen tourists come and go and always talk about things they wanted to buy and to gain. He said that all that he ever wanted to have was already his, completely free. It was the mountain he lived on, it was the sky and the clouds in the sky, the little mountain roads, the trees, the rivers and streams, the little animals on the paths. He felt he had so much- the whole world! He was grateful to have so much! He said he was greatful to have learned that god was everywhere. And we knew here was a man truly rich. He was the richest man I have ever met.

On the whole it is a great freedom that you enjoy when you’re on the road. During this time you are free to just be. You have no deadlines, nothing that you have to do, nowhere that you have to go. You let intuition be your guide, you are free to be spontaneous. I don’t like to make many plans when I go travelling. Like Lao-Tzu says, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." I research a bit as to important sites I don’t want to miss. But the best part of travel is just to wake up in the morning, go out and just walk in strange new places. Follow some signs, something people you meet randomly recommend to you, or sometimes just some roads that seem interesting, there might be a beautiful old tree that draws you near, it might be a lovely little puppy that begs you to see where its going. Wondering around aimlessly can in the end lead you to places that astound you and change you, but you went not knowing this, you went cause you enjoyed the path itself.
You are on the journey and that’s your only aim, your only goal is to keep going and enjoy everything that you find. You are a silent witness that passes through places like the wind, loving everything on the way. Just like when you meditate, and in fact when you live, the only difference being one is done in the “outer” and other in the “inner” world, but of course at the end of the day both of these worlds blend in to each other and dissolve such differences.

AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman, excerpt from the poem Song of the Open Road, from the collection "Leaves of Grass"

And finally I would like to share some fantastic and inspiring quotes on the subject of travel:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”- Mark Twain

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freva Stark

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

Travel has been such a learning and growing experience for me, the most effective type of meditation, and I feel I have gained more from it than from any school.

Yes, I love to travel.