"And any man who knows a thing
knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all
And every time I felt the hurtin'
I felt the givin' gettin' me up off the wall"
K'naan
Travels are all about choices and sacrifices: a left turn can lead to the most rewarding ascension, meanwhile a detour can bring unwanted incidents. People rarely choose to know and that is precisely why they never learn.
YOLO
At the start of a trip, there is nothing but excitement and anticipation. Finally, we're about to do something we have been dying to do for ages: time to feel and be alive, time to feel free, flee and...free fall. Boogie jumping through spacetime gets people going; dashing through new adventures, fantasies and hopefuls. Still, what are the actual outcomes?
The main concern is not to bank or retain: it is to break, create and recreate. We don't usually know what we want until we need it....badly. And by the time it happens, the space we have left between the want and the need has become wider, fuzzier and blurrier. We can't account for what it means to us anymore simply because it matters no more.
FUD
The whirlpool of our self-imposed experiments can drag us down in a hole deeper than the tiniest singularity. The hide-and-seek game of looking out, living round and losing hope presses us more and more into a tunnel vision. If I don't reach what I set out to grab, am I not lost? Did I not lose my grasp on what it means to win? I could have done something else in the meantime and got better results! And so goes the relentless cycle of fearing the unknown in doubt.
Opportunities rarely patiently wait to be met: first come, first served; last to reach, first to be ditched. And it's not even that they pick and prick at people: they often have this vague presence that does not register on everyone's radar at the same time. So how do we get a hold of them? A permanent state of perception yields poor performance, and so does constant immersion. Balancing the known with the projected can give a head-start, but resources can be drained over time...in vain.
Solving the great equation of time/investment*positive returns is the great computation at work throughout our lifelong tribulations. Even when we think we have missed out, we gain from the loss and carry the balance forward. Minus plus minus equals a plus, which is why, at the end of our binary lives, the amount of zeroes early laid aside the ones give a much bigger figure than originally experienced.
"Yellow moon. Ima mo, mittsu kazoete, (Yellow moon. Until now, counting to three,)
me wo akete (Open your eyes)
Shadow moon (Shadow moon)
Mada yume wo miteru." (Still now done dreaming.)
Akeboshi
Going on a trip is the occasion to expand our horizon in a deliberate and controlled way. It's a paradoxical adventure in which getting lost is determined by how to trace your way back. So where is the appeal of such risk-free ventures?
Business as usual
In the grind of our modern life, we have come to realise that we do live extremely secure and regulated routines. There is a time for sleeping, having fun, working, leisuring, studying, experimenting, and even traveling.
From the CEO of a major corporation to the brown-collar farmer, each individual seems to have a sound idea of what they want to do, when, who with and how. It's all about having a purpose, a goal, an objective that can be broken down in a series of stages.
And that's how we measure how accomplished we have become: so long as the tally keeps adding and crossing, we rise to new heights of self-satisfaction and pride. The flowchart is clear ahead, the milestones are clean cut, the accounts are all in order. The only thing that is driving everyone forward seems to be the race for the stamp of success and the papier mâché award.
Tokens of redemption
There comes a time to appreciate the history made: the digits are being squared in spreadsheets but the protocols keep piling up. What of this new product? How about the latest trend? Who can best represent the brand? When is the upcoming valuation?
This is when the sky scrapers of vanity start to tumble down, while the pile of doubt sky rocket. The charts and the diagrams that use to mean everything suddenly appear vacant. A click of the mouse or a negligent splash of rain can, in an instant, destroy all records of busy-ness.
But who will be blamed, if not the system itself? Everybody carries the trophy, but nobody sheds the tears of downfall. Reality checks in on all, regardless of stature or status. So, when the space ahead looks full of roadblocks, the best is just to make up a new map. Traveling becomes the escape route into our own reflections, it swirls our focus back to the genesis of who we have become. As we dig into our own accounts of memories and lost aspirations, we buy ourselves some time to set the records straights.
And this is why we like to go on a holy day: the pilgrimage to the altar of our identity. This is not really an act of devotion and commiseration, it is more of a tribute to what is essential and meaningful. Here, the stakes are low, not because we mindlessly gamble with our time and our space, but simply because we know that there is nothing left to lose.
"If you know your history
Then you would know where you're coming from"
Bob Marley and The Wailers
As the world and life move forward, it is often too tempting to sit back and linger with fragments of time passed. Revisiting moments that are no more and events that died long ago has the soothing appeal of a comfortable discussion. Yet, what we look for is not an explanation or a commemoration, but a entry point for future deliberations.
The matter of facts
Once upon the time, something happened: at a place, at a time, among people. and for many reasons. We have lived through these situations and have observed, retained, reflected on what they meant for us, for others and many more to come. For a while, it might seem like all is done and clarity has been found: no more dwelling on the past, "time to move on", etc. And this is the only available option in this life: time sets us in motion so that arresting its developments is out of the question.
However, when the clock ticks, it does not tell me whether I'm gone up or down, left or right. Time has no cardinality, and this is why to be lost in time is more enticing than to be thrown out in space. As we get pushed forward by the arrow of time, our collection of experiences grow, and it soon becomes vital to take a break and reorganise the backyard of our existence. The longer we live, the farther we have been, the more pressing this burden is.
Doddles and puzzles
So, it comes off as a surprise that the littlest moment of recollection has very little to do with time. Since imagination is not spacetime-bound, it can travel beyond what was, is or will be. It knows no limit of reason, logic, emotion or organisation. Therefore, diving into our memories relieves us as well as it relives what our mind has in store. For some people, it is all about reassuring themselves that they still have their sanity and traditions intact. For others, it is the chance to explore hidden meanings and patterns that can be used for future predictions.
And this is why looking back is never a definite position, nor a sustainable option. In times of crises, backpedaling serves no other purpose but to help re-establish grounded foundations for incoming tribulations. After running through time and space, we get lost in our internal landscape, we don't hold onto our own clock anymore. That is the perfect moment to give way to our imagination and bring forward the designs of our own creation. Simplifying complexity systematically reveals order in the apparent chaos: life is clearly our lesson in applied alchemy.
"Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not."
The Arctic Monkeys
Traveling has a way of melting your memory and reinventing your history. As you rush through different spaces and places, you shift from one standpoint to the other with seamless ease and natural adaptation. It soon becomes a question of finding not the perfect path, but the perfect fit for your ideals, ideas and goals.
Kaleidoscopic me
The search of self is only an excuse to roam about the side tracks and unpredictable ways of life. One day it's a straight line, another day it's a hyperbolic curve, or a spiral a week later. These unintended shapes and pathways integrated in the miscalculated outlooks we bear break down the core of who we originally were. Life becomes a fractal: a pattern that explodes into multiple directions and that loses its meaning under several and repeated readings and starting points.
But interestingly, there is convergence of actions and movements towards the same original centre. The same way petals always sprout from the bulb of a sunflower, everything that we do, no matter how disoriented, roots back into the seed that stays within us. It's only that the people we meet at certain times and certain spaces keep an image of us that immediately becomes outdated the moment we leave and move on.
Memory in sharding
This is precisely why keeping in touch is such an important stepping stone for our identity. It's all about checking that the scattered pieces still fit into our mental puzzle without breaking down our perceived unity. Is the experience that I had with person Z in line with what I'm doing in place Y? Will the things that I learn in place B help me link back to what I used to do with person A? The interrogations never cease and keep producing more sub-categorisations, taking more of our internal energy as we go.
Yet, none of this is apparent to the external eye. As long as people recognise your personality and behaviours, you are still who you are in their minds. They will keep telling that story of how you disappeared into an unknown country when you were 21, the same way they see you look into the future and make further plans to walkabout. What they don't see is that the younger you and the current you are far more disconnected than the narrative that they tell. The early experimentation has turned into deliberate exploration.
It's only much later, down the fractured trenches, as the fields mount into the dead bodies of your rotten history, that you will be able to see the grand design. The patterns that you traced, the shapes that were left under every shortcut you made. These are your signature: the information you traded while undergoing identification checks.
"Your prince's crown
Cracks and falls down
Your castle hollow and cold
You've wandered so far
From the person you are [...]"
Keane.
Traveling just doesn't happen in physical space, whether past, present or future. It takes place, first and foremost, in our mind. It can be boiled down to how we configure our desires, pilot our plans and even execute our dreams. We have to crunch numbers beyond kilometers, days, currencies and probabilities to produce a valid output.
Missed representations
Sure, there might be people who can pick up a bag at the drop of their hats and stream their lives away from any predicated guess. These are the wanderers, the adventurers, the criminals, the anti-socials who serve as counter examples to the orderly ways of the society. Do they meet a happy ending or a tragic fate in the end? It would be hard to account for, because they set themselves up with unknown parameters from the start.
The appeal of travel is already very mysterious in itself: it's like evolution is giving continuous prompts for you to get up to speed, on your feet, into the wilderness. The challenge is always terrifying and the variables impress with their randomness. Certainly, it would pay to prepare and to validate different algorithms for potential threats. What to do if it rains? Where to sleep if no money? How to call if no network? When to leave if romantically entangled?
Endlessly scalable
So, the human brain can compute anything and everything, real or imagined, relaxing or threatening. You can decide which path to walk at any crossroad, but you can only do so when you have envisioned what is likely to happen in a set environment. In the comfort of our familiar surroundings, this process has compiled conditioned reactions that are so predictable that they lack refinement. I know how to navigate my town to reach my home, even if the world is to end.
This is why, to sharpen our downtrodden instincts, we need to update our database in a new setting. It is testing and trialing: sometimes with major errors, often with common bugs. But the reward comes from the experience itself: going up, and down, sideways, straight or backwards; there is perpetual movement. Traveling is a deliberate surveying and mapping of the pathways towards the origin of our consciousness.
"Might last a day, yeah
Mine is forever"
Courtney Love.
We often think we are living unique moments and experiencing special events when we are at the peak of positive emotional reactions. It might be something we waited for so long to happen, or a situation we had been planning for years, months, days that suddenly comes to life. We are exhilaratingly taken by the instant, as we realise how much of our past selves we had dedicated to this present moment.
Where was my mind?
So where does the heightened sense of accomplishment comes from? Is it because of the time that was spent in waiting? Could it be because we did not quite believe things would unfold for our own benefit? Or was it that there were so many hidden variables to compute into this single output? Regardless, there is always the feeling of potential risk or loss in the gambling wheel of life. What we predict is often what we hope for, rather than what we really picture in our mind.
And it is true that in our head, there is a constant chaotic whirlpool of emotions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, ideas, memories, plans and perceptions. At one end, we can choose to relentlessly isolate some of its elements, but on the other end, we could go by total abandonment, allowing ourselves to get sucked into the traumatic drama. This is what we do when we are in the blues, waiting for the internal tempest to uncover a new way to make sense of the world. Depression indicates the limits of our mind in dealing with its own confusion.
Probably a maybe
So what gets us back on track? Nothing more but a game of probabilities: the lure of navigating the chessboard and turning ourselves from pawns to knights to queens. It is nothing more but mathematics applied to real-time digits and figures, though we all want to bet on the road that is the shortest to the King's castle. In this mental race, we wrongly believe we alone can see the way forward for ourselves. We ignore training and pattern recognition. We forget our mind is just a machine eager to learn...to death.
As a result, we have to dabble about in probabilisms most of the time: maybe we are going for the best, maybe we are staying for the better, the results can only be known after we have gone through all of this. And this is precisely what makes us feel stuck: changes are embedded in our lives and so are our attempts to override them. Who can say they have always had triumphs, without ever experiencing defeats? Only those who run away from themselves can afford such consequential lies and deceptions...
"You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first..."
Regina Spektor
Why are some moments more memorable than others? What makes someone special? When is it that wandering in space becomes aloofness? Who decides that I am, indeed, a unique individual? There is something mind-boggling about facing these interrogations inside out and wrestling with whatever conclusions are derived from them. When you are used to walking steadily along a familiar road, it can come as a revelation to explore what makes you yourself.
Chaos in osmosis
So, we have our instances of being tempted by the rabbit hole, often for the sake of seeing something new or uncovering well-hidden secrets...and possible treasures. We look for opportunities to slip away from reality and jump into the fantastic. It can be a house that we believe is inhabited by a ghost, or a twist in our chest that tells us that the person in front of us is "the one". At times, we are convinced to have received a mission from above to do what we do. We go through the experience and end up self-aggrandised and relieved, somehow, that our identity is once again preserved from the rub of others.
But we can't prove any of this. There is no formula to extract from our reflections, no theorem to conceptualise our findings. We can check with peers whether what we are saying makes sense and review it all in therapy, yet it remains immaterial. How can it be real, when it can't be seen, touched, smelt, heard nor tasted? Even worst, how can I be sure that what happened only ever happened to me and me only? There definitely is no guarantee in the uniqueness of my escape: there might be countless of others who have swirled into the same black hole and shut themselves from the scrutiny of the outside world meanwhile.
Quizzing the unique
The fact is, experimenting with ourselves might initially appear like the most singular thing to do, because it's the raging impulse to KNOW that pushes us past the horizon's line. The path is infinitely uncertain and we are on a quest to make sense of the probabilities ahead: it's a question of cataloguing the world around us and building up our own internal framework. As we walkabout, we trace our past, dot our present and sketch our future in quick strokes, since time is always running away when space closes upon us.
In the end, each pathway becomes uniquely integrated in knitting our world line. The thread was stamped by us and for us, and no one else. This unique footprint is the essence of our existence, simply because although we might have crossed and followed others along the way, we always succumb to our own wanderlust. This is also what helps us shape a universe of our own aside other multiverses. We are all on our own planets, insulated from time to time, colliding at other hours. And the memories and experiences we have are merely what remains after our precious biosphere has been thoroughly annihilated.
