Thoughts & Things

Traveling Without Traveling

One particular quote that I have always been found to be exceptionally true, is the following quote from Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Experiencing the world at large is one of the best ways to become more educated about the world at large. Travel gives us an understanding of what is out there. We fear what we do not understand, and gaining understanding is the best way to reduce that fear. Sadly, we can't all afford to travel, and many of us who do travel on occasion cannot afford to do so on a regular basis.

With this in mind, I wanted to bring up some the ways that we can travel the world even when we do not have the means to leave our hometown.

First and foremost is reading. Reading is one of the best ways that we can educate ourselves on the world around us. We can read history books or travel guides, and allow ourselves to get acquainted with the reality of those places. We can read memoirs, journals, autobiographies, biographies, etc, and allow ourselves to get best acquainted with the real lives of other people in the world. Journalism and photojournalism are also a great way to attempt to understand other people and places. For many people, things like Humans of New York has done more to humanise the world around us than any of their resort vacations possibly could. If we don't know what other people experience, how else will we come to understand it? Even reading fictional tales allows us to encounter a fictionalised version of real people, places, histories, and political systems, and allows us to develop a better understanding of those other places and different experiences. As a writer, this is part of why it is important to me to include small truths that I know from my own experiences into my longer fictional works, so that I can share my own experiences with others as part of my own artistic expression.

Reading is one of the most obvious ways to learn about other places, but it isn't the only way. Film is also an incredibly important way of travelling without leaving your home. We have the option to watch documentaries, which seems the most blatant way to learn about other places. We can understand the places, the histories, the people, and social and cultural dynamics that we might not otherwise experience. However, just as fictional books allow us opportunities to grow as people, so do fictional films. This becomes more rocky territory, as it is easy to take the latest Hollywood production and believe that harmful untruths are actually factual. This is not what I mean when I say film is a form of travel. One of the most wonderful ways to learn about far away cultures is to experience parts of what those cultures experience. Film is ingrained in many cultures around the world, and seeing what those cultures see is part of experiencing those cultures. There are some areas that people see as being primitive compared to the western world, but that is part of what we as a people need to move past, and many of those cultures have their own film industry. Using my local library, hoopla, my netflix account, vimeo, and youtube, I have come across films from anywhere from New Zealand to South Korea to India to Romania to Iran to Senegal.

In the same line of thinking, as part of experiencing another culture without being there, music is a huge part of culture. Music styles, instruments, and lyrics can all be a part of individual cultures, including more spiritual music. Being able to hear what people listen to for fun or for worship, being able to hear what they might hear on the radio, is an incredibly underrated way to experience what far away places are like. Hearing what the spiritual music sounds like can allow you to learn about that spirituality, but also to have a spiritual experience all your own. Hearing the lyrics they sing can allow you to understand what people are going through, as far away music deals with real experiences just as much as local music does. Music can also tell the story of a place's musical history, when you can hear the differences in genre and instrumentation so plainly.

Basically, if you can't travel, you can still travel. Your body doesn't have to get anywhere when it's nourishment of the mind you are looking for. Travel can help, and it's a wonderful experience, so I am by no means discouraging going places physically. But learning doesn't end at the body. Learning is in the mind. You can see what another place is like, what other people are like, what other experiences are like, and what other entertainment is like without having to go to those places. If your body can't travel for one reason or another, let your mind do the work for you.