Before you travel this summer...
Summer is coming - how should we think about the travel?
The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned
Maya Angelou
The night was dark in early December 2024. I was high above the clouds, on the 75th of 78 flights that year, when this essay started to take form in my head.
By that point, nearly 40 round trips in, the novelty of the travel experience had worn off. You’ve been in good hotels and bad. You’ve had amazing meals, and grabbed the awful prepared sandwich in the airport as you run to catch a connection.
So, on that quiet night, I pulled out my iPad and, at the top of a blank page wrote:
Why do we travel?
It’s a question we typically don’t give a lot of thought to. Every trip has its unique reason - a wedding, a meeting, a funeral, a vacation. Isn’t the answer obvious in the goal?
But consider, in the last year alone, over 60% of the US population flew on an airplane - that’s over 150 million people. Travel is more accessible today than any time in history.
Years ago, I encountered the saying that travel ‘shrinks the world by broadening the mind.’ That concept has always resonated. Bizarrely, the more you see of the world, the smaller it is as you see how similar people are regardless of where they call home.
Today, I want to consider what being home offers us, as well as what being away does.
What is home?
Home is such an implicit concept that we may not think about it directly. If we probe our memories though, there are certain times and places that feel like home to us.
I can distinctly remember the first time I walked into the library at Wake Forest. The main foyer is the beautiful, open space and I immediately felt at home. I was 17, it was a gray, rainy, spring day, and I knew that’s where I wanted to go to college.
Maybe for you, it is a favorite window seat. Or the smell of something in the kitchen.
There are people who buy and live in the same house for 50 years. These are the “homes” that Steve Martin’s character in Father of the Bride was willing to stand in front of a wrecking ball to save.
But home isn’t solely defined by its longevity.
There are others who move frequently - military families or even the old school GE executive families. Homes for these families are more fluid - changing with more regularity.
But are they any less ‘homely?’
I lived in 3 houses before leaving for college. As an adult, I have owned 3 houses which have felt very much like home, even though we may have only stayed in each for 5 or so years.
Why? It seems odd that something so powerful, definitional even, can also be so arbitrary.
Certainly, homes are where our stuff is. Our possessions tell the stories of our lives. They bring us joy. They serve a declarative function - telling the world who we are and who we want to be.
Homes become places of safety. Places where we can lay down a degree of subconscious guardedness that we assume each time we venture out into the world.
Familiarity supports this. In our homes, we know what to expect. We know which light switch to use. Which floor board to skip to avoid squeaking. This predictability gives us the ability to shift most of the activities of daily living from conscious thought to the habitual.
I know where my tea cup is in the morning and where the kettle is on the counter. This incremental bit of mental space is quite liberating.
We can focus on other things.
But if home is so great - why do we so frequently want to leave it?
What we gain by being gone
Presumably, a simple definition of travel would be that anytime we are not at home, we are traveling. But more so, it is the disruption of the usual rhythms and routines that mark travel.
Travel may involve relaxation and recharge. It may be a place where our responsibilities are lightened and we experience the benefits of being served in a hospitality setting.
Travel may also involve new sights and experiences. Physical exertion in the form of hikes, walks, and elephant rides. Mental engagement in museums, tours, and other places of culture.
Travel can also be a lot of work. It may be about seeing existing clients, trying to sell to new ones. Trade shows, dinners and entertaining. It can be both a boondoggle and exhausting.
There is something deeply appealing about travel.
We’ve seen throughout modern history that when a middle class emerges in a society, they begin to travel. As the Japanese rebuilt post WWII, they began to travel en masse (read The Billionaire Who Wasn’t - the story of Chuck Feeney and the creation of Duty Free Stores).
If you have been abroad in the last decade or so, you’ve seen that the Chinese are doing the same thing.
Pastor and theologian David Gibson highlights that as humans we are in a forever [balancing act] between the familiar and the novel. Familiar things are wonderful and we love them. And at the same time, we crave new experiences.
Travel is one of the ways we experience the novel. Being in new places, encountering new things, stimulates our brains in new ways. We form new synapses as we navigate language barriers, strange locales and the like. This additional mental work heightens our awareness of our surroundings - giving us far ‘bigger eyes’ to see the environs we find ourselves within.
Importantly, travel offers perspective on the things that we consider as default. The postmodern concept of cultural “meta-narratives” is largely obvious to those who have spent time in multiple cultures. The norms of everyday living are only normal in a certain time and place.
But what do we lose?
Make no mistake, travel is not all gain.
There are things we lose when we are gone.
You may be familiar with the story of the beach in Thailand that has had to close as a result of all the damage from tourists trying to get the perfect Instagram snap.
But at a personal level, when we are gone, we give up our presence in our home places.
In an increasingly ‘thin’ world, our social relationships are already tenuous at best. Being gone puts pressure and risk on those relationships. It weakens the community ties of our primary community.
In fact, a regular conversation I have with client families is about the choice to consciously limit one’s ability to be anywhere, so as to experience the deep benefits of being fully somewhere.
Much of what makes home valuable is the lengthy duration we have of being in the same place. When we are gone too much, we limit the opportunity to go deep within a place. We do not give our relationships enough frequency of interaction to develop.
Travel can also become just another consumption experience. The travel industrial complex is real.
The ubiquity of the internet has homogenized large portions of culture. You can see the same stores and restaurants almost worldwide at this point. The risk of this is that we end up experiencing “the place” vs. the actual place.
My favorite example is the Morocco section of Epcot. Meant to be an encounter with the place and culture of Northern Africa, and yet, Disney has included ‘specialty’ Moroccan cocktails in the infamous Drink Around the World challenge. Of course, being a Muslim country, Morocco is essentially dry.
It’s not just Disney; it is easy to pull out markers of a place - its architecture, cuisine, and music - and call it the place. As if the distillation of something is the same as the thing in itself.
So what should we do?
First, we should all thoughtfully consider the objective of travel.
Where are we going and why? Is it for rest? for exploration? for escape? How is that counter-balanced by what we are leaving behind?
If we are leaving for pure escapism, how can we build more ‘novelty’ into our life at home? Are you investing in your community? Are you practicing hospitality with others as a way to root more deeply into a place?
Consider a more articulated rhythm of life. Just as a week has days of work and days of rest, craft an annual cadence of time away and time present.
But when you are away - be fully there. Among many things that were inspiring about the late Anthony Bourdain was his seeming ability to be present. His TV shows show a man enthralled by the places he is at, right then.
Travel is a part of modern life, a wonderful part. Engaging with it intentionally and thoughtfully can allow it to be even more impactful to us all.
A bonus freebie
When you are away, please, for the love, be self-aware.
I have overheard people in airports complain about being “hustled” by others. Someone trying to get around them in line or to their boarding group while the way is blocked by group 8 (seriously, just sit down).
While 150 million people may fly annually, the vast majority are only doing so 1-2x a year.
If that’s you, please recognize that there are those in your vicinity who may be traveling more in a month than you do in a decade.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be courteous, but please recognize that there are rules and rhythms that you are likely not aware of.
Pay attention and watch, you may learn a few things that make your own journey better.