Your mental state plays a surprisingly strong role in your perception of place, as revealed in the personal experience of Ekaterina Petrovna.
Your perception of place depends on your mind.
Travel is not just a physical experience. It is a state of mind, a life journey. And it can be all kinds of different things to different people.
Some of us travel all the time, some of us travel occasionally, and some of us only travel in their heads.
For some, it’s an exploration of museums in Florence, or a week at the beach in the Canaries, or a spiritual retreat in India. And some travel while staying where they are.
Travel is often an escape, a relaxation, a search, a dream. Many people work the whole year long thinking about their holiday. Some try to get away every weekend. Others plan a trip to a different country as soon as time and money permit it. And there are those who are on the road all the time.
But whatever is the destination, whatever is the journey, usually all of us have a place called home. A place where we rest before traveling again, or simply the place where we were born.
And quite often, we fail to see its beauty.
We talk about other destinations. We often dream of a better place, a better life, a different country, another journey. But how often do we talk about enjoying the place called home?
Your Inner Journey
Travel, you may have noticed, is directly related to the state of our minds.
Travel has only to do only you, and how you perceive your own existence, your own inner journey.
If we go to Paris on a with the biggest love of our lives, it’s highly unlikely that we won’t enjoy the place. (Paris is actually very difficult not to like, but it happens).
If you go there while you are miserable, you might find that Paris is a very miserable city. Even if you stay at the best hotel and visit the best restaurants, even if you explore the whole Louvre.
The same with other destinations. You might stay at the worst hostel, have your camera stolen, and eat only bread the whole day long…but still enjoy your journey.
And this has nothing to do with the place. It has to do only with you, and how you perceive your own existence.
Osho, the great mystique of the last century said that “beauty lies in the banality of things”. He also said and quite often, that the world’s misery lies mainly in the West. The richest countries in the world is where you find the biggest misery.
Pack Your Baggage
Happy people don’t travel in order to escape. Happy people travel simply because they just love to travel.
Photo: jojiang
And that is why travel starts with you, because whatever your destination, whatever your journey, you always take yourself with you. You always carry your misery or happiness within you.
It happened to me. I visited one of the best cities in the world – Barcelona, and failed to see its beauty.
That’s because I was miserable at that time. My parents, who had brought me there, thought that it would help. I managed to laugh once while being there, but as soon as I came back to Amsterdam (my other home) I was back in my misery. I hated Barcelona. But I hated Amsterdam as well.
But Barcelona was a lesson. It was an opening for my eyes. It was a push to start life-changes in the place where I lived. It was a push to transform the place called home.
Amsterdam became my home. Even if I wasn’t born there, even if I hated it and loved it at the same time.
It became my home because once I was back from Barcelona I realized that it wasn’t the city which I hated, it was my own life.
The Choice
If you feel miserable in your life, you should travel within your own city. Look for another job, find a dancing class near you, discover a new café, find an unusual bookshop, make new friends, or find people who can help you.
Photo: littlevanities
The travel which I started in Amsterdam eventually led me to another place, another job. A totally different life in a new country.
You always have a choice, and you always can ask for help. But here’s the key: you need to travel into your inner mind.
We are happy when we have balance in five important spheres of our lives: money, job, relationship, health, and creativity.
One of the main lessons I learned in my life is that you usually always have the money that you need. It’s other spheres of our lives which ask for a bigger effort.
The Value Of Home
My misery is not gone entirely, partly because I still live in the West.
Misery is everywhere, even if people can afford a lot of things, even if they can travel to the Caribbean islands and stay there in the best resorts. Even if they have Internet at home and plan their journey from start to the end with the help of the computer.
You can be the richest person in the world, but fail to enjoy your journey.
You can be the poorest man in the world and still enjoy your journey.
And this is because you know the value of home.
It starts with your soul. And each human soul has an enormous beauty. Each human soul has an exploration, a journey, and a discovery, which can tell you all about life and the world without the necessity to take a plane or a train and go somewhere.
The beauty of the banality of things is what you do in your daily life, and how you perceive the place where you live, and your own inner journey.
Travel starts with you.
What are your thoughts on how your mind influences your perception of travel? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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13 Comments... join the discussion!
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Hello Sarah,
thank you for your comment and interesting observations!
I do agree that you need a certain level of comfort to enjoy life fully. What i meant is that some very poor people are happier than very rich people, simply because they know how to enjoy life. That said, also some very rich people also know the true value of life, but I have met only one in my life, and that, not even in person!
I just feel that sometimes it is easier to live without possessions, but as to me, I do enjoy an occasional trip to the spa or a nice meal at the restaurant. The thing is, I can afford these things, but some of them I also don’t really need.West is a very broad definition i agree. i have problems with coining down the term for my PhD purposes as a matter of fact. But it is still being used by sociologists, to define mostly Western hemisphere, even if there is no real agreement as yet, what exactly is in there, and the tendency is to abandon the term, or indeed to specify in more details (for the lack of space, i didn’t go into details here). As to me, I consider the West all countries which are influenced by the American way of life, – which brings us to almost the whole world at this moment:)
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It’s clear to those who’ve committed to the idea of long-term travel that we’re not escaping from something—but rather escaping to something. Like Rolf Potts in his book ‘Vagabonding’, my wife and I view long-term travel not in terms of escape, but in terms of “adventure and passion”. This idea is cultivated by Doug Lansky in his book, ‘First-Time Around The World’. Doug writes that “travel is an urge best cultivated from within”. And we agree. Hence, we believe that long-term travel doesn’t imply the concept of escape—quite the opposite, it implies a notion of surrender. It’s something that we’ve written about before!
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Hello Daniel,
I do agree with you. I also travel all the time. I am changing countries of residence like someone might change a perfume. And i do enjoy it, even if for now I would love to stay where I am now…and just travel for pleasure…
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Good insight! I haven’t travelled yet but I sure plan to, I hadn’t really consided that travel could be miserable if I were miserable, I’ve just been assuming that travelling will pick me up if I’m down and trumps everything else. I plan to start really travelling summer 2010 and my only real consideration has been my girlfriend of 5 years, do I want to travel if I’m going to be worried how my prolonged absence is going to affect that relationship? It’s a good thing I’ve still got lots of time to think about this lol.
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Great story Ekaterina and so so true!
It took me a long time to work that out, but there are few places in the world that you can’t make a home out of , if you really try.
I’m back living in Dublin after a super-long absence and was very nervous about it would all work out – but using the same ways of making friends and finding activities in more ‘ exotic’ countries is making an adventure out of my hometown. It really is all in your mind.↵ -
Hello Niamh!
Thank you for your comment!
We make place called home ourselves, and sometimes, it is just the state of our minds which determines the way we look at home. To come back to what Daniel has said, some people make home out of travel, and there is a beauty in exploring and experiencing new things. Some of us are more domestic. Even if I love travelling, I need a base, a place where I want to go back.
I had a brief look at your blog, – great stuff! Very interesting for me, as I have been on the move in the past 12 years:)↵ -
Question: So why are you still living in the West if you think it contributes to your misery? Is it the money? Isn’t that the main reason the “West” is miserable? There’s an old saying: “No matter where you go, there you are.” Hmmm.
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Hi Bill,
I think that since Sarah set the tone for all comments with her remark about the West (which I don’t think should be disussed here, but at a sociological forum, and which was not the primary idea of the article), everyone got the wrong idea about what I wanted to say. Or maybe, I am just a bad writer, and the word West comes as the main item.
The article is not about the West!
And since you ask, I am actually extremely happy at this moment. I would say, hilariously happy! Especially that the debate about the West makes me giggle.It’s the amount of self-help material available here which puzzles me in the ‘West’ and that people around are miserable…and buy more and more of self-help books to find a way out of misery.
The article was about the state of mind while traveling…by the way↵ -
Hi Ekaterina,
It did sort of take a sharp left turn there, didn’t it? I realize that the point was about the state of mind while traveling, and I do agree with the thrust of the article. And your writing was good, but you definately made a reference connecting the West and misery that obviously not everyone agrees with. (And that’s not necessarily a bad thing). And you article is both about travel AND sociology so it’s difficult to separate them.
“Wherever you go, there you are” just as easily applies to travelers. I remember once sitting at a table in a small diner in a very large desert. We were all marveling at how the colors and formations changed about every 20 miles or so. As another group sat down at the table beside us, we heard one of them say “I’ll be so glad to get out of this desert. Rocks and sand, rocks and sand. Will it never end?” We still marvel at that.
But I’m not sure that the “misery” that some people carry with them is in any way the product of Western values or even capitalism. Maybe it’s a result of just being better off and having time to fill. Sean, in his comments, alluded to “a crisis of identity”. Identity crisis is by and large a luxury of the materially successful (at least in the large numbers we see in the West) whether it’s L.A. or Saudi Arabia. Poor people just don’t have time. And they don’t travel much (unless they’re escaping something). So I don’t think that the people who take their miseries with them when they travel have anything more “sociological” than an unfortunate personality. Otherwise more Westerners would be miserable when they travel. That hasn’t been my experience.
Sorry if I’m rambling. You hit it just right about balance. That’s the key isn’t it. But gee that’s hard to do. Keep up the interesting writing, please.↵ -
Wonderfully crafted and thought provoking piece Ekaterina. I must say i am a bit puzzled by the philosophical arguments about Eastern vs Western culture etc. My take on it is that the article is a whimsical reflection of some spiritual aspects of travel and not intended to be an in depth critique of western society and culture or a comparative study with that of the East. But there again maybe it is me who is missing the point!?
Although i agree with you that your initial frame of mind and mood can influence the subjective experience of travel i also think that the converse is true in that the experiences of the travel can change your outlook and this can be both positive and negative.
However, it is certainly true that if you are inherently unhappy within yourself you can’t escape this by travelling but more fundamental changes are needed either within yourself of to your own perception of yourself. Nor can you escape such feelings of misery by joining a dancing class or reading a book. These may provide some respite, temporary relief and distraction but won’t cure the problem.
And i think this may be where some of the problems with Western Culture lay which you refer to in your article? That much of the misery we feel today cannot be bought out of with money or materialism and nor can any lasting relief be expected from television, social networking, the internet or any of the escapisms provided by the entertainment industries or mass or popular culture.
There is something very subjectively different from the misery in western or developed areas of the world, which i agree with what you seem to allude to in that it is a spiritual sickness, a crisis of identity, an emptiness, to that of the more physical and environmental miseries e.g. homelessness, starvation and poverty that are more characteristic of developing countries. I personally believe that there is plenty of resources in our world to provide for everyone. The issue isn’t lack of resources it is how they are unfairly and unevenly distributed that leads to poverty but that’s another story altogether.
And this is me trying not to get involved in a politico-philosophical debate!!!
Keep up the good work!↵ -
Dear Sean and Bill,
thank you both for very insightful comments!It’s funny, but when I was writing the article, I hesitated myself for a second about the term ‘West’ (after all, I am a sociologist, and know the trouble around the definition), but left it after all, and Sarah just picked up immidiately my own fear. Ha-ha!
To what misery is related is a big question. I was miserable in Amsterdam. It’s a lovely place, but somehow I knew that I wouldn’t be happy there. But before leaving the place, I first worked out on why I was miserable and why did I want to leave the place.
In the place I am now (a small town in the UK) I am happy. And it is still a capitalistic society.
One can find his or her happiness everywhere. But I had to learn first that I didn’t want to be attached to material values, even if I do enjoy some luxiries in life, and don’t see anything wrong in indulging oneself in some of them.
But I do feel a general crisisof identity indeed. Society needs some change, but in which form?
Personally I think that we need more awareness about what really matters in life!↵ -
“What really matters in life”…. Now we’re slipping from sociological to theological. “What really matters in life” is what fundamentalists wage war over. I think it’s more personal than that. Paraphrasing Freud, we need work that we find (personally) meaningful, something to look forward to and friends. Works for me. Travel is the thing I look forward to. And backwards too, I guess, in the form of fond memories. And certainly, getting back to your article’s advice, balance in money, job, relationship, health, and creativity fit with what Freud was saying. If there were a way for society to help us discover, early in life, what we were really good at, and aimed us in that direction, …….
Enjoyed the article and chatting with you. Keep writing. And traveling. Ciao.↵
