How We Travel

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

John Steinbeck

What is special about travel? You are always traveling … from one place to another, from one task to another, voyeuristically through facebook posts or vicariously through streaming media. If nothing else, through time. Even when sleeping, the subconscious surfaces and you’re traveling again through dreams. Inexorably, you’re in transit in some form from start to finish.

These ordinary moments are an unconscious form of travel – and not so different than our current trip across the world. The circumstances might look at odds, but the end result is the same. In life, there is only one journey, and everything in between has equal weight. All personal growth, retrogression, mundanity, glory, and failure are witnessed through the lens of travel.

Small is the new big

Travel helps nurture curiosity and its children: experience, knowledge, and self-reflection. Stepping away from the insulation of the daily grind allows you to breathe the free air and see how small you are… how wide the world is. That smallness is delicious and so full of opportunities. With some humility, you trade in your claustrophobic nationalism and become a global citizen.

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

Augustine of Hippo

I like the way travel is depicted in ye olde days. Originally meaning to toll, labor, it would later pass that meaning to its offspring travail and come into the current usage – though keeping the underlying quality of effort, as in ‘to go on a difficult journey’. In the myths, travel was the medium of personal transformation, full of dangers and opportunities, with the principal characters returning forever changed.

How we travel is how we live. The more you give to it, the more you get from it… and it helps to remember the inverse relationship between expectations and happiness.

All this jawing about travel… going somewhere?

Portugal! The land of salt, seafood, and saudade. The #1 world power of the 15th and 16th centuries and the country that created the Age of Discovery.

There’s something attractive about a place that has risen to rarified heights and then had to live out the balance in comparative obscurity. You find the experience and wisdom (with perhaps a touch of longing and regret), and none of the insufferable cocksureness of young power.

“Oh, salty sea, how much of your salt
Is tears from Portugal?”

Fernando Pessoa

To be honest, the subject rather snuck up on us, and that we’re making such a long holiday of it is surprising- I don’t think either of us has had 2 thoughts about the country our whole life. And yet, over the course of a few months, we found ourselves learning the language and dreaming of beaches, grilled sardines, and long afternoons in the Alentejo sun.

Escape from America?

A bit, yes.. and I won’t lie and say that America’s turn of social and political extremism isn’t a significant factor. But escape isn’t the only (nor the main) reason. We love the ideal of our country, and of course our life, family, and friends – but want a different influence in our perspectives, our art, our souls – something old and mature – something ‘less’ in a world of ‘more’ – a different pace and different set of values.

But for now, it’s just fun and exploration – a 36-day weekend. A chance to be children again in a place where we don’t know anything.

We’re on our way. Tchau!