On the move
I have just returned to the US, and as I was arriving in North Carolina recent words from a friend kept rattling in my head: “Go, Go, Go”, the driving mantra of a traveller.
I am a traveller. Not a tourist, but someone who likes to go to new places, to stay and live there, to enjoy a new experience. Then, after some time, I feel the need to move on once more. Moving on can be about new places, but it can also be about a new activity or area of work, even a new place in my head. Sometimes I travel while staying where I am!
Returning to North Carolina after three months, I can already sense that I will be in a different place. For sure, one new task for me will be working with a group of students who have decided to set up a business based on the work of a medical researcher at Wake Forest University. The business will focus on adding probiotics to some foods, creating a healthy food supplement. In a strange way, this will take me back to many years ago when I was on the board of a health food company, one that specialised on supplements for sports people and gym users. Strange indeed for someone who has avoided gyms and exercising for years. It seems I will be involved in the same area of business, healthy foods (nutraceuticals), but with a start-up using a novel and potentially exciting approach.
I am a traveller. For me, travelling can be confronting at times, given I prefer not to go back to a place or an activity where I have spent time before, nor do I like to feel obligated to the past. For some reason, I enjoy the exploration of a place I have never visited (even if I feel uncomfortable and uncertain some of the time). Some people are different and like to return to where they feel most at home, to old friends, to where a child lives, to the places already well-known.
There is much that is out of personal control in this, of course. I am the US right now because my partner, in our early days together, said she needed to spend some time in the US: “Yes!” I thought at the time, and probably said out loud!! There is an allure to living in a new place, a new country. Living elsewhere, not being a tourist, but becoming embedded in a new culture, a new way of life.
Thinking about wandering, I often return to Theodore Zeldin’s musings on travel:
“Over a century ago the historian Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) said there were six kinds of tourists. The first travel for the pleasure of moving, absorbed in counting the distance they have covered. The second go with a guide book, from which they never separate themselves: “They eat trout in the places it recommends and argue with the innkeeper when his price is higher than the one it gives.” The third travel only in groups, or with their families, trying to avoid strange foods, concentrating on saving money. The fourth have only one purpose, to eat. The fifth are hunters, seeking particular objects, rare antiques or plants. And finally there are those who “look at the mountains from their hotel window… enjoy their siesta and read their newspaper lounging in a chair, after which they say they have seen the Pyrenees’. There will doubtless always be tourists wishing to repeat these routines, but there are other possibilities. Tourists may be content to look at places and things, but travel is also, more interestingly, the discovery of people: it is travail, it requires effort, and its reward is a transformation of both the visitor and the host.” [i]
Yes, being a tourist is less fulfilling, although it has its benefits, too. Even as a tourist, I prefer to stay in one place for a week or so and absorb something of a new environment, although when I was younger, moving on was what I did.
Zeldin went on to observe: “The first characteristic of travellers who have been more than tourists has been that they have not found what they expected, or what they were looking for. The ability to realise that one is faced by something new has not been easy to acquire, since most people see what they want to see. Travel became an art when surprises were transformed into advantages.” He saw travellers as a “nation of a special kind, without frontiers, and they are becoming the largest nation in the world, as travel becomes no longer a mere distraction but an essential part of a whole person’s diet.”
Somewhat frustratingly, he had to end his splendid chapter with an observation I don’t share: “A journey is successful when the traveller returns as an ambassador for the country he has visited, just as an actor is most successful when he enters into a character and discovers something of himself in the part he plays.”[ii] As I have commented before, I think the successful traveller is just the same as the actor, discovering something of himself in the people and places he sees.
But I wonder what we see if what we are keeps changing? Are we moving on from discovering something about ourselves to reconstructing who we might be next?
I am a traveller. When I travel, I am always seeking, looking for something, but I don’t think I know what it is I am trying to find. I know it isn’t adventures (although I enjoy the adventures I have). Perhaps I am always seeking ways in which I can do something worthwhile?
I often think about the story of the hedgehog and the fox. The story takes many forms, best known as a thought experiment by Isiah Berlin. The various versions all start from observing the Hedgehog and the Fox are both great survivors, but for completely different reasons. Foxes survive through coming up with new tricks to catch prey or evade predators. On the other hand, Hedgehogs survive by doing just one thing (by rolling up into a spiky ball) but doing it very well.
My version is that the Fox is hungry, and is always trying to catch the Hedgehog unawares, but fails at every attempt because the hedgehog rolls up before he can be attacked! Am I like the fox, always trying new tricks, yet quick to abandon them afterwards? I’ve tried being a researcher, teacher, manager, leader, adviser, photographer, adviser, commentator, novelist, blogger. Being a novelist for a while has been fun, but like so many other things I do, only for a while, not even do it very well. And now I am asking what next?
I am a traveler. I don’t seem to care that I leave nothing behind. Like the fox, I just hop from one thing to another. I suppose that started at university. On the escalator, about to become a geologist, I hopped off to try social anthropology. Then dream research, social psychology, policy, medical education. I was well on the path to becoming a dilettante: in one five year period I wrote papers on conceptual frameworks, medical students, legal education, psychiatric treatment in therapeutic communities, assortative mating among university teachers, dreaming and the menstrual cycle, and psychosomatic illness! A dustbin head, full of bits and pieces.
Then I joined Shell. That slowed me down. Life was now focussed on management and leadership, and it was a long time before I left that world, retiring from RMIT University seven years ago. Now I am back travelling with a vengeance. No traveler can escape his or her biography, however. There is a fascination with people, how they think, and what they do that sits behind all my travels. I am fascinated for my own reasons, but I do wonder what I give back: enabling others, provoking thinking, helping people realise their potential?
Of course, I am exaggerating. I do go back to things I have done before. Teaching has been like that. From time to time, I find myself back at a university. However, when I return I try to teach something new, a new area, even a new faculty. The same is true with photography. I use the camera more like an artist’s tool now; before, it was much more of a recorder, a reminder of places I had been. And back when I was at school, it was the fascination with contrast, with black and white photography, that drew me on.
As for writing, that has always been there, but both my style and my ability have changed over the decades. Early on it was writing in a monograph style, documenting research studies of one kind or another, boring academic books complemented by dry academic papers for journals. At another stage in my life, it was all about writing reports for government, facts to justify policy changes. Then I went back to more sustained activities, and tried writing books about practical philosophy, and then current events. Now I am trying to go in two directions, a weekly blog about things that catch my interest, and detective novels. I had tried being a novelist many years earlier, and attempted to complete a story four times: each time, after finishing a first draft, I deleted the manuscript. I am going to keep working away at writing novels, but I sense it may be just another entertaining sideline (entertaining for me, at least).
I am a traveler. Travellers are restless, always unsatisfied, always on the verge of trying something new. Travellers do go back to where they have been before, but usually much has changed before they return, whether they go back to people, places or activities. Travellers can be lonely, selfish people, avoiding ties and commitments, yet yearning to contribute. To travel, accompanied by all you have learnt, is fun but frustrating. You must keep going!
As travelers go, I am in a very minor league. I do believe life is a journey. To be a traveler is to experience life, and to steal and change a favourite quote from another friend, arrival is synonymous with death. (He said “graduation is synonymous with dying”!)
Of course, I had to find the quote: “life is a journey, not a destination”. More to the point, I could find the words, but not the source. T S Eliot was the author of the quote said one reference, and another attributed it to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Careful reading of various sources made it clear it was neither. However, searching led me to Daniel “Dan” Eldon, a British-Kenyan photojournalist, artist and activist, who was killed in Somalia in 1993 aged 22 while working as a Reuters photojournalist. He left behind a series of journals, which been published in four books, “The Journey is the Destination”, “Dan Eldon, the Art of Life”, “Safari as a Way of Life” and “The Journey is the Destination, Artist’s Journal.”[iii]
Dan Eldon was a serious traveller. Born in the UK, his father was a British citizen of Jewish descent, and his American mother was Protestant of German and Irish immigrant descent. When he was seven years old, the family moved to Kenya, where he attended an international school with children representing over 40 nationalities. When he was fourteen, Eldon started a successful fund-raising campaign for open-heart surgery to save the life of a young Kenyan girl. Later he helped support a Maasai family by buying handmade beaded jewelry made by the mother, then selling it to fellow students and friends. He began creating his journals, filled with collages, photographs, and drawings, and cartoons.
Throughout his short life, Eldon travelled extensively, visiting 46 countries. In addition, he studied seven languages in and out of school. In the summer of 1989, he and a friend led a group of young people from Nairobi to Malawi, driving a Land Rover across five countries. They found that staying in local jails was the safest solution to security problems, and often spent the night locked up in cells, apparently much to the amusement of the prison guards.
Based on his trip, Eldon, set up a charity named Student Transport Aid. This attracted the interest of local TV television stations and newspapers. With the help of fifteen friends, he raised $25,000 for a venture to go to a refugee camp in Malawi. The friends, representing six countries, met in Nairobi and travelled thousands of miles in three vehicles. There, they donated one of their vehicles, as well as money for three wells, and blankets for a children’s hospital. The team members? They included Christopher Nolan, (director of “Batman”), Roko Belic (Oscar-Nominated director of “Genghis Blues”), Elinor Tatum, (Publisher of the Amsterdam News), Amy Eldon Turteltaub (Producer and Author), Jeffrey Gettleman (Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times Bureau Chief for East Asia)!
In April 1992, Eldon flew to Kenya, and began working in the Kenyan refugee camps. Still there in 1993, he followed the turbulent events in Mogadishu. In July 1993, with two others he covered the United Nations raid to arrest a clan leader. Survivors of the raid went to the journalists’ hotel requesting them to take pictures. In a convoy, under the protection of Somalis, Eldon and a group of colleagues went to the bombed area. As they began to take photographs, a mob attacked the journalists. Eldon and his colleagues were stoned and beaten to death. What a life. His extra-ordinary and brief career was made vivid through the publication of his collection of journals. His life was a magnificent journey.
I am a traveller? Some sixteen years ago, I moved out from the city back into the country (I prefer the quiet of the country). At the time I declared that this was my last move. Foolish words. Nine years later I was on the move again, and when we found our current home in the US, I thought “well, that’s it; no more moving”. I didn’t say it out loud, because I knew, against my best wishes, I was unlikely to spend the rest of my life in the US. The thought of going somewhere else remains as daunting and as exciting as ever, but I think I may be slowing down. How many more times will I travel to a new place? More physical travel, relocating once again? I think that is less attractive as I am getting older. But travel in every other sense, new activities, new skills to develop, yes that will continue.
To stop travelling is to stop living. It is always time to be ‘on the move’.
[i] From Chapter 17, Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, Harper, 1995
[ii] Op Cit
[iii] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Eldon>
