Part of the 2013 Blogging A to Z April Challenge
While contemplating the final entry in this year’s Blogging A to Z Challenge, I wanted not only to find something – anything – starting with the letter Z but also something that summed up travel in general, not as physical action but philosophically. I was looking for something that could explain why we travel, that might distinguish it and emphasize its importance. That something, for me at least, is Zen.
Travel is an art and it requires an artist’s eye, as well as patience and practice. Many, many people go places. Some go to do things, others to visit, still others as a means just to be elsewhere. Few, however, travel. Earlier in this series, I quoted cultural historian Paul Fussell in the post Evolution in Travel. The entire passage is:
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. … The explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. … If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.
To me, the most three most important words in that passage, the words that I think embody travel, are simply “the traveler seeks.” Therein we find Zen in the art of travel.
Zen emphasizes the attainment of enlightenment with an emphasis on “suchness,” or reality just as it is. Even further, the word Zen is derived from the Sanskrit dhyana, to absorb or meditate. As a traveler, that is my goal: To absorb my destination. If travel is to make us more worldly, we must learn, adapt and adopt. We must seek enlightenment. To Fusell’s point, that’s what separates the tourist from the traveler.
While part of me doesn’t want to miss the tourist attractions, I don’t want to be limited to them either. I have no great desire to go where no man has gone before (so I won’t be signing up for the Mars expedition!) but I do want to know about the places man is and has been. I want to know about the people, their history, their future, and their reality, just as it is. I think every traveler yearns to learn about the culture and society of their hosts, to taste their food, enjoy their pastimes, and join their celebrations, both special and everyday. These experiences are the mark of a traveler, and are readily visible in their carriage and manner. More importantly, they are apparent in tolerance and respect.
Through meditation and practice, Zen seeks enlightenment. Some believe the enlightenment is within us from birth and through Zen we realize it; we become enlightened from within. Travel enlightens us from without, exposing us to knowledge and experience from all points and points of view so that we might better understand the world we live in. And, perhaps, enabling us to discover what is within us from birth.
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