When I launched this blog earlier in the year, I had just arrived in France for the summer. The previous nine months I had spent in Austria. And the two years prior to that – pretty much the entire pandemic – I had passed in Croatia. So, being American by birth, I went with American Nomad as a theme. I imagined myself traveling and writing insightful essays about my experiences. The intention had been to consider travel from a more introspective perspective, to explore myself while in a state of travel.
But I soon got myself in a tangle. Starting with my definition of nomad.
I call myself a nomad only because I have no home I consider permanent, not because I’m permanently underway. But in the strictest send of the word, nomad for me signifies those constantly on the move. Bedouins and van living meet the criteria.
Yet I am far from the country of my birth. My residence is scarcely big enough to qualify as an apartment. And my commitment to continue living where I am – the town, the country, even the continent – is fickle at best. After happily spending nearly a year here, I still don’t feel certain about where I might be this time next year. I am the antithesis of the hometown boy. But does this make me a nomad? Does it really matter?
Yes… and yes. Because, if I view my life over a period of years instead of weeks or days, then the motion can be seen as perpetual, like the motion of a snail that is almost imperceptible in the moment but really only visible by the trail left over time.
Although I write this from my temporary abode in Austria and not from an airport, I am still far from my place of birth, far from the culture that shaped me, far from the language I speak. I feel as alien being here as I would in a hotel room in some other country. Only the immediate novelty of an unfamiliar destination is missing. That doesn’t make this home, only the place I am.
But as it stands, I need to be in a place for a while. There are a few things I need to get done.
That includes a reassessment of what I’m writing about here.
Despite being stationary at the moment, ironically, more is happening than at almost any other time in my life. Actual travel is only one small part of the whole. After a lifetime of hard work, I’m financially independent. In fact, after a recent divorce, I’m now fully independent. It also happens that I finally finished a novel that I began writing over five years ago. And the posts? articles? essays? I scribble do at the very least sharpen my writing skills. To be read would be a boon.
What I find curious is that, at a time when I have never been more independent, more in control of my life, much of what is happening to me lays beyond conscious self-control. I experience effects which I can’t ascribe to my own deliberate causes. It seems that by having more independence and acting on it, stocks of something stored in my subconscious have risen to the surface. When I sleep, I dream more – more vividly, more realistically, and just more – than I ever have before. When I wake during the night, my mind is like a Times Square of frenetic thoughts and ideas. The more directional I am in my thinking (by day), the more my thinking chases the unexpected. A chosen vista leads to a multitude of vistas; the search for a known world by a different route leads to unknown worlds.
To remain focused in my thoughts and writing solely on travel in the conventional sense would be to remain too narrow in scope. It would mean keeping both eyes on a single tree while choosing to be blind to the forest. And it would do a disservice: it would deny the potential power of that single tree. Because that one tree might be the reason for the forest that surrounds it.
Yet, thinking about travel won’t just go away. Many of the questions I probed regarding travel – what purpose it fulfilled; what meaning it held for me – linger. I can’t read anything that mentions travel without pausing to consider its relevance to my own thoughts. I continue to follow (and marvel at) those on social media who are incapable of holding still. I wonder how long I’ll be able to hold still myself.
I’ve discussed all of this with a friend who is a hardcore solo female traveler. We share the same opinions about the value in travel, the immediate benefits we experience while we’re away, immersed in the moment and far from the obligations and aggravations of home. But it got me no closer to answering why I’ve always been so drawn to being underway, being nomadic, no closer to understanding the real impact of travel on my character, my spirit, my being.
I still look to other travelers who might reveal clues about myself. But the list-makers and statistics collectors don’t interest me. Crossing off target destinations and boasting about the number of countries visited just doesn’t impress me. Guides and destination descriptions only interest me to the extent that I’m curious about a place. And that usually means I’m waiting at the departure gate or already on the flight to that destination. I don’t see myself as one of them.
The bloggers and writers who go deep on culture and cuisine or go well off the beaten path are more compelling. But in their travel diaries, they often fall short of soaring beyond the superficial impressions of the moment (as I do). Because what fascinates me is what is happening inside all of us when we travel. Really travel. What causes that insatiable curiosity? What thirst does it slake? And what does it really do for us in the moment and later – long after we’re home?
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari attributes it to the “pre-existing imagined order” we are born into and its myths which shape us from birth. We travel because our society conditions us to do so. He writes:
“Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways of doing all this is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life.’”
According to Harari, romantic consumerism – essentially the purchase of experiences to make us happy – keeps the artificial construct of our society ticking over. This myth encourages us to splurge on travel to exotic places with the expectation we will return a new person.
Harari is understandably cynical about consumerism but somewhat dismissive of romanticism. There is nothing inherently wrong in the belief or hope that different experiences will benefit us as humans.
Romanticism was a reaction in the form of a set of ideas to the birth of our modern world. Consumerism, on the other hand, is a simple driver of capitalism – a supposition that purchasing products and services leads to happiness. It is consumerism alone which supports the “imagined order” and has done so by monetizing what romanticism in fact was: an artistic movement that preferred emotion to logic, nature to technology. It remains in many ways the antidote to the illness caused by civilization. What Harari proposes is a union of the consumerism myth (as he applies the word) with the romantic anti-myth. Consumerism, with its “market of experiences,” has cheapened travel; it invented tourism as we know it. While to travel – properly travel – remains outside the “imagined order.”
Because something about the travel I did over the summer – two months in France and a couple of weeks in Georgia (mostly Tbilisi) – did make an impact. I wiggled at last out of the ghost of a corporate yoke that had numbed my senses and dulled my intellect. Traveling solo allowed me the chance to reflect more on the impressions my experiences made on me. It made me more introspective. I discovered things about myself that were, perhaps, not so new but, while alone and in unfamiliar surroundings, had been made striking and undeniable.
A greater sense of rootlessness (nearly all that I owned was in my car), I think, contributed to the certainty in my realizations about myself and others. It is a powerful tonic to combine rootlessness with the inescapable demand for self-reliance. It is a curious and intoxicating blend of flirting with a more vivid and permanent sense of nothingness and facing full ownership for your immediate physical well-being. Sustaining this condition over time clarifies vision, sharpens the senses, clears the mind. I formed confident opinions informed by observation and experience. And, based on these, I made hard decisions about my life that I’ve so far stuck with and remain unlikely to change.
This is as far as I’ve come with my thoughts on travel. Although I feel there is more to explore, I also feel it can’t be forced. It must be allowed to reveal itself in time. Meanwhile, the travel I did experience over the course of the summer and the unfolding experience of my new life in Austria has sparked other questions. I’m compelled to cast the net wider. And I will.