5:00 am. The jazz/electric funk band's (consisting of a singer, guitar player, saxophone, trumpet and a dj) set at the Sugar Factory draws to a close. I exit the club along with my work colleagues I came with and say goodbye. My two weeks in Amsterdam will be over in just four hours, I’m leaving. As attached as I became to Barcelona after two weeks, leaving Amsterdam proved much more difficult, there were so many more opportunities, but not for now. The people I met there were great, and, if I’m being honest, I might have to rethink my philosophy on goodbyes. It’s nice to wish someone well and say thanks, even if you've only known them for a couple weeks. The city served me well, and I am grateful to its loyal servants.
I check the time. My bus leaves in four hours and my hostel serves breakfast in two hours. I leave Leidseplein and walk back to my hostel through the gorgeous Vondelpark, glimmering ever more brightly, slowly unveiling itself as the morning creeps in. I enter my hostel, grab my journal and a pen and head back outside to Vondelpark. I find a comely spot by the lake and dig right in; I start writing:
As this is my last night in Amsterdam, it marks the end of my travels abroad (of my junior year). I've done the math, added up the figures and I have spent over 13 weeks of my ten-month abroad course outside of Norwich; or, in other words, travelling. 4 weeks in London, a week in Northern England, a week in Prague, 3 weeks in Spain/Portugal, 3 weeks in Belgium/the Netherlands, weekend trips to Edinburgh (2x), York, Cardiff and London (3x). I have spent over 3 months away from my flat in Norwich, meaning that just under one in three days of my study abroad have been spent travelling. Sometimes my home has been the Arran House in London, or Fabric nightclub staying up all night, or the Muir’s home for Christmas or a moth ridden mattress in Barcelona. Really, the experience of this year has been a constant adjustment of what defines my home. Throughout this year, I have felt American and I have felt English. I have ‘been from’ Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, England, Norwich, America, in Czech Republic I was from New York, but just as a means of saving time, and just once the whole year have I 'been from' Carlisle. But this is not true solely for me; the identity of a ‘home’ is an elastic and tenuous one at best. What is your home? The four walls in your parent’s house. The small town in central Pennsylvania? Your dorm room? Your frat house? As I look at it, your home is where you are right now. Everyone seems to think that ‘home’ is such a permanent word; while I find it to be one of the most temporary concepts in the English language. I must have called twenty different places ‘home’ throughout this year. Simply put, if you are not going back to it anytime soon, then it is not your home. I have been away from the states for 10 months now, and that justly reflects itself in my conception of home. When I was staying in Barcelona, I quite literally forgot I was a university student, a university campus is a home of sorts. As a third of this year has been away from it, Norwich too has shared its irrelevance in matters ‘home’ as well. But it seems paradoxical and inconsistent that we (or maybe just me) adopt all this elastic reference towards ‘home;’ for, when you are travelling, it becomes a dreaded word.
The concept of travel is very loaded and hard to define. My basic definition, travelling is the act of putting oneself into a position. This can be mental, emotional, physical or geographic. It can also be a new or old position, but it must require a change or alteration of sorts. For me, I feel that all of the above apply to my year abroad. I picked up my body, my mind, my emotional ties and took myself away from America some 10 months ago. I embraced the new, the changed and the altered. Sometimes I got a nice warm hug back, sometimes I got hit on the head. Both are very positive experiences.
As I see it, when you travel, you are not exploring geography or famous monuments and cities, you are exploring yourself. You are putting yourself in a physical position at some far and exotic point on the tip of the earth just to see how you react to it. And in this isolating condition, you react differently and think differently and in this state of newness, you learn things about yourself. You learn how daring and gullible you are. You learn how smart and uneducated you are. You learn how your little amount of AP Spanish you learned in high school actually makes things more difficult for you in Madrid because you cannot understand the words coming back to you. You learn about the different people, how they live and how it affects you.
This is an enormously constructive process for a growing mind. If you place yourself in new and exotic surroundings, alter your conceptions of what is a home, what is a job, what is my consciousness and in it, you learn. If you do it right, you can’t not learn. Well, you don’t exactly learn, you relearn. Relearning how to walk down the street in Barcelona is an easy one; relearning how to construct a friendship with a language barrier is more difficult. It’s jostling at first, even though fun. You revert to the things you know at the most basic level. Those preconceptions might be: “Oh, he’s from Pakistan ... I don’t know about him” or “No way am I going to eat that.” But then you relearn the things that you know how to do. It just takes time. When you have a couple days in a city, you won’t relearn much, so you’ll see the famous cites and be threatened by every brown person you see, thinking they are going to snatch your camera. But if you stay longer, a week or two, you can relearn quite a lot. And you can adapt what to know, apply to your new surroundings. It’s a constructive, healthy process for any mind.
Travel brings out the most basic instincts from inside yourself and you can either accept them, or change them. Travel tells you things about yourself and it always tells the truth; you can accept them or change them. It’s just about putting yourself in that position, that physical, mental or emotional position, then you can explore yourself, what defines you and determine what you want to change.
Throughout this year, Socrates (along with George Carlin and Cat Stevens as close runners up) has been the most influential person on my life; for, he has said, in my opinion, the wisest words ever known to man. In his trial, which ultimately leads to his execution, when he is being accused of thinking himself the wisest man in Athens, Socrates defends himself by saying, “I know I am the wisest man in Athens because I know that I know nothing.” People often misattribute this quote and think that it is a quote on wisdom. It’s not. It is a quote about ignorance, for there are no wise people in this world. One man may be wiser than the next, but that is only a measure of the degree to which that the first man knows of his ignorance, the degree to which that man knows he knows nothing. You can think what you want, but every person reading this blog, including its writer, is an ignoramus. But there’s nothing wrong with that, everyone in the world is. It’s only when we fool ourselves, when we try to convince ourselves that we’re not, that we know something, that’s when you get into to trouble. And, don’t get me wrong, sometimes it is hard to convince yourself that you know nothing. Out of all the things I have learned this year, it is a tiresome task to keep saying: "Luke, you're a dumbass."
Socrates’ poignant ignorance has become a maxim of mine for travel; and, as life is just a ride, life too. When you wrap yourselves in a comforting blanket of wisdom (unaware that it is a blanket of ignorance) and never take a step out of your door, you think that you know things about the world, because you are not challenged and you don’t challenge yourself; therefore, in your infinitesimal bubble, you know a lot about what is going on within, so you say to yourself, ‘Damn! I’m smart.’
But if you venture out, you realize, instantly, you don’t know shit. And as you see more and more, the point becomes ever clearer. It is an inverse relationship. The more of the world you see and hear and feel and touch and taste, the more the world convinces you of your immense ignorance. When you see the world, you can begin to conceive, albeit ignorantly, of its vastness, that each city contains treasures not available to the passing tourist; in other words, that you don’t know shit about this place.
If one was to come to Barcelona or Amsterdam (I stayed in each for 2 weeks), stay for three days, they would think, ‘Well, I’ve seen all the things that city has to offer, beautiful places, now off to Paris.’ After spending a week in each city, for a brief moment, I thought, ‘You know, I love it here, but I could leave.’ In both cities, I neglected that impulse, and, after a second week, when I had to leave, I thought, ‘Damn. I could stay here for years.’ And, school notwithstanding, I really could have.
When it comes to travel, I really frown on the “Ooh, Rome? That’s lovely, do three days there.” Or “Brussels? Great place, but you can do it in a day.” All that shit is nonsense. What makes you think that you can determine how long it takes to see a city that you’ve never been too? Fuck that noise. That type of thinking reduces travel to solely a visual experience, when it is so much more. Travelling is mental, emotional, social (a HUGE part of it), intellectual, physical and (for me, despite being an atheist) spiritual.
***
So the year’s up. Over. Done with. Finito. And what strikes me as odd is that I am not as distraught about leaving England as I thought I would be. If you were to ask me 4 months ago how I felt about returning to the states, you’d get an answer riddled with hatred for America and denial that I would ever have to return. But ask me that question now, and I’ll tell you that I’m ready for it. I think back to my disdain for Allegheny and America during my spring semester sophomore year and through the summer, and I think that it basically all comes down to me not being content to remain in one place, be it physical, mental, social, emotional or geographic. I constantly desire to ‘put myself into a position.’ I’ve also said that travelling does not have to be within a place you’ve never been before or a place that you do not know well, so as I've been gone so long, America will definitely be a change or alteration.
Life is journey and we are constantly travelling through its mazes and riddles. We are all restless travellers embarking on the greatest voyage known to humankind, called life. Regardless of what you do with your life, always realize that you are travelling. Life is a journey. From when you are born until you die, you will always find (if you look for it) that you are constantly putting yourself into a postion. Life doesn’t last, but for a fleeting nanosecond of eighty years or so, so if you remain in your blanket of wisdom, thinking 'I've seen enough,' if that is how you choose to travel, you’re wasting your journey on expensive houses and cars, feeling safe, hoping that these material possessions (along with faith in God) can stave off the inevitable, the unavoidable, the dreaded thought of ... home ... LW
