Forty-Two: Travel Channel (03-01-2023)
It's funny how prevalent and celebrated the travel genre of television is. It's not funny, but obvious, that the success of TV programs that feature exotic environments, people, and cuisines, are watched in spades by broke and overweight Americans. What is funny is the genuine attempt many "hosts" make at presenting their opinions as accurate, concerted, and devised in editorial separation from the larger agenda of the network and their own biased view of the world. Recently, travel extraordinaire and European vacation expert and writer Rick Steves happily accepted the title of "Spiritual Socialist" from analysis of his books and travelogues. While this title- and Steves' admission of Christian faith- pleased both alleys of politic, it confirms that travel can, through a lifetime commitment and persistent self-awareness, produce a consciously informed and compassionate person. On the other end of this spectrum, garnering even more respect, are bombastic figures like the late Anthony Bourdain, whose wry humor and unholier than thou attitude gained him notoriety in his not-as-short-as-you-might-think life.
The illusion that travel content, from corporately clouded TV, to advertiser-friendly, over-naïve YouTube, to your high school friends' Instagram feeds, is that travelling abroad, or domestically even, will instantly and absolutely produce an enlightened worldview. After having personally spent months on end travelling, in Rick Steves' favored Europe and Tony Bourdain's favored Italy, it's become pleasantly apparent that travel is only travel, a fun and expensive experience, and that developing an enlightened mindset from exposure to new places and cultures is entirely optional. Many I passed on my travels, who were more travelled than I, had developed no real enlightenment, and most who I traveled with only further engrained their existing preconceptions of the world, or buried the challenges they faced into a perpetual cognitive dissonance.
The wealthiest traveler is afforded the luxury of disregarding any need to develop enlightenment, for the world they travel in is more of a theme park and less of a planetary neighborhood. The poorest travel, if that is such a way to describe the bane that is backpackers, are usually the harbinger of the stereotype of travel's nirvana nurturance, if not the content they and their wealthy adjacents produce. The sad truth, unapparent to those unable to travel, of backpacking and traveling in general, is that it is truly exhausting and overwhelming to the point that its continued pursuance- as in the case of backpackers- creates a psychotic and delusional state of faux-enlightenment, a mental rejection of actual circumstance and nuance, and a surrender to a comfortable love-and-flowers hippy attitude. Understanding travel, and intelligently incorporate the lessons it teaches a person, that person must remove themselves from the world abroad and return to monotony. What lesson does a journey teach if it never ends? What good is learning from the world if you cannot return your knowledge to where you came from?
Ostensibly, you are where you are from. If you travel, you have a responsibility, if not a necessity, to return. To travel again is likely, and certainly enticing, but without return, you exist in a perpetual unknown world, tormenting the concise-narrative-hungry mind into toil in an increasingly unknowable place, unable to digest its stimuli.
In Don Quixote, Don Quixote returns home, and slowly escapes his delusion of knight errant. He offers little advice to his companion and family, little analysis of his adventure as it applies to home. His loss in delusion, as is the loss that travelers inspired by content and quick spiritual answers, is the opportunity to experience in each moment of his time traveling the moment itself, and to parse the larger implication (not meaning), upon return.