Day 6: Treadmill Thoughts

If you think running on a treadmill is boring, try it on a ship. Between rocking back and forth and staring at an ocean, your body is quite busy trying to stay balanced while your mind gets pretty philosophical and reflective staring out into an open ocean. When you stare at a fire, somehow ten minutes pass and either your mind stills, or you have laundry lists of what you have to do the next day or something like that. Something similar happens when you stare at an ocean for long enough, but somehow it turns who you want to email to catch up with, things you want to work on for yourself, or you come up with a new set of life goals. Or, your mind stills.

I’m sure it’s not just me, but everytime I think about when I’m traveling to I think, what on earth am I going to do in Hong Kong? How will I know which temples to see in Kyoto? What on earth does one to in Myanmar? This is going to be one of my biggest challenges out here. My mom has always said I’m a driven person, which in the “real world” is a good thing for jobs and such. But for traveling, I beg to differ. While I consider myself a laid-back person for the most part, especially when it comes to travel, I’m too eager.

So, in my preparing for my first stop in Hawaii, I looked up the word ‘travel’ with my small (expensive) amount of internet to shed some light on the subject. When I googled the word, I noticed that no definition comes up. Which is sensible, since people just know what it means. But when I searched the word on dictionary.com, this is what comes up:

to go from one place to another, as by car, train, plane, or ship; take a trip; journey

Simply put, but okay...

to move or go form one place or point to another

again, okay...

to proceed or advance in any way

pretty vague

to go from place to place as a rep of a business firm

sure?

to associate or consort

no idea

to move w speed

makes sense, but not really applicable

to pass, or be transmitted, as light or sound

again, not applicable

basketball: walk

pretty irrelevant

to move in a fixed course, as a piece of mechanism

My point is that no one really knows what travel is. You think of it as placing yourself in another destination to explore the culture and history and art, or to vacate, or whatever it may be. But my treadmill thoughts put my perspective on the other side of it. My goal of this trip is to think of travel as meeting half way. In my opinion, travel only requires a person to put his or herself in a certain place, but its also about letting the culture and people come to the person. This sounds like a no brainer- when you’re abroad, things happen by chance and you run with it and that’s what makes the experience. Not only does it seem way more intuitive when you have the ocean in front of you, cheering on you and your thoughts no matter how “well, duh" they actually are… but people often forget to take a few hours and put aside the historic buildings and famous works of art that you apparently came there for. And that is something I want to work on throughout this trip. I’m sure it’ll happen that way, but again, it’s sometimes hard for me to tell my brain to shut up and stop anticipating and over-planning. There's an art to relaxing...it's called yoga, and I clearly need to be doing more of it.

To end with another quote:

“What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.” – Anatole France