How to Travel

by The School of Life

and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.

So he slowed things down and recommended we spend far longer looking at impressive things...

Ten minutes of acute concentration at least are needed to draw a tree; the prettiest tree rarely stops passers-by for longer than a minute.

There’s a long tradition of going travelling in search of things we lack.

we are continually exposed to the enviable lives of others; our imaginations are haunted by our comparative lack of success.

For the truth to hit home, we may have to immerse ourselves in true poverty and a genuinely dysfunctional society.

travels to places where the true hardships of existence are grimly evident can provide a needed education in gratitude.

Our encounter with the reality of the lives of so many others pushes us towards a more accurate perspective on our own condition.

Going home is, usually, the very sad bit. Does it have to be?

And yet the two groups are travelling to the very same place. Once they have crossed customs, they will have before them the same monuments, museums, landscapes and foods.

Would it not be one of the greatest skills, the most helpful kind of practical wisdom, to know how to sample a little of the excitement about our own countries that travellers are able to locate there?

consider how much you might notice if you walked out of the front door, and imagined you had never seen any of it before,

‘boring home’ is always someone else’s deeply exciting ‘abroad’.

A trip lasting many hours and costing what could be a small fortune may be initiated by nothing grander or more examined than one or two mental postcards.

When we imagine a scene, we imagine not a film, but that far briefer and in many ways far more forgiving medium, a picture. And yet, we are never in a destination just for a moment,

But if the camera started to linger on the scene, we might rapidly grow twitchy. What is fabulous in increments of seconds can become properly maddening after half a minute.

It’s not that we’re ungrateful or shallow, rather that we absorb beauty quickly and then want to move on. Beauty is like a brilliant joke: we laugh, but don’t need the comic element to be continuously replayed.

The lovely mental pictures that get us to travel are – in essence – hugely edited versions of what we actually encounter in any destination.

the vast labour of getting ourselves physically to a place won’t necessarily get us any closer to the essence of what we’d been seeking.

in daydreaming of the ideal location, we may have already enjoyed the very best that any place has to offer us.

we spend a lot of time – and even more money engineering pleasant experiences.

We shove the nice things that have happened to us to the back of the cupboard of our minds and don’t particularly expect to see them ever again. They happen, and then we’re done with them.

We should learn regularly to travel around our minds and think it almost as prestigious to sit at home and reflect on a trip we once took to an island with our imaginations as to trek to the island with our cumbersome bodies.

Part of why we feel the need for so many new experiences may simply be that we are so bad at absorbing the ones we have had.

We certainly don’t need a camera. There is a camera in our minds already: it is always on, it takes in everything we’ve ever seen.

We talk endlessly of virtual-reality. Yet we don’t need gadgets. We have the finest virtual reality machines already in our own heads. We can – right now – shut our eyes and travel into, and linger amongst, the very best and most consoling and life-enhancing bits of our past.

THE SHORTEST TRIP: GOING FOR A WALK

The need to go for a walk comes from the same place as the longing to take off to another country: with a desire to restart our minds.

We sometimes cannot work it all out by staying rooted in one place. We have stared at the screen too long,

The better part of our minds has a habit of getting exhausted and sterile. It is scared as well. Some of the most profound thoughts we need to grapple with have a potentially disturbing character.

An inner censor tends to kick in and block the progress we were starting to make towards ideas that – though important and interesting – also presented marked threats to short-term peace.

The rhythmic motion of an easy stride helps to separate us from the ruts of our current preoccupations and allows us to wander more freely though neglected regions of our inner landscape.

In physical terms, we’re hardly going any distance at all, but we’re crossing acres of mental territory.

A short while later, we’re back at the office or at home once again. No one has missed us, or perhaps even noticed that we’ve been out. Yet we are subtly different: a slightly more complete, more visionary, courageous and imaginative version of the person we knew how to be