Stirring Point

On my recent trip to China, I was humming along, happy to feel my feet pushing down on new earth. Professionally, my life’s work was the culmination of this moment: I was being paid to travel and to do so in style. 20 years ago, the idea seemed like a pipedream. The only ways into the world of “paid travel” seemed to be through nepotism, journalism, or some tourism degree I’d failed to discover. In my mind, travel was a passion and only a passion—one that would never pay me a dime.

As it is, things worked out differently, and getting paid to travel has been a part of my job for the last 12 years. I’ve bounced along bumpy roads in Cuba, Madagascar, Borneo, and Uganda. I’ve camped in Antarctica, kayaked in Greenland, and hiked to postcard-perfect monasteries in Bhutan and Ladakh. The dream of my 21-year-old self has been realized and repeated over and over.

But I’ve also spent huge chunks of my time wandering from place to place, adrift of purpose beyond the simple act of “moving.” The habit took root in my early years because it was free, and stretching a dollar meant stretching my days abroad. “A world on foot is a world well-seen,” I told myself. Unscheduled time, wandering and walking, is how the “good accidents” of travel occur, and I still believe this. Ramadan in Alexandria, when a shopkeeper pulled us into his store to break fast with him; a sailor in Tasmania inviting me aboard his vessel for a rip through the Hobart Strait. Travel requires respiration: the inhale of plans, the exhale of serendipity. But it’s the engagement with the shopkeeper and the sailor that gives me pause. Most of the time, meeting locals was a bonus, not a focus. 

Mind you, meeting locals is not as simple as saying “hello” and being welcomed into their community. But travelers have a way of siloing themselves with other travelers, reducing time with locals to transactions and support logistics. And when connections are finally made, the moments are often in service to the traveler’s story alone. Often, our cardinal sin as travelers is our failure to plumb the depths of a community we meet by slowing down and listening. We mostly show up, ask for help, collect our experience, and move on.

This idea had been gnawing at me for awhile now, telling me there’s a problem somewhere in my approach. Caveats made it slippery and difficult to place. That’s the nature of a traveler. We engage when we can, but time is limited, and we have to keep moving.

Then, while reading The Message by Ta Nehisi Coates, I came across the following passage:

“Passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.”

His words sucked the air from my lungs like a shopvac. I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the heat of embarrassment flood my cheeks. This was it. I’d walked through a huge chunk of the world and somehow managed to walk past most of its people. Like props and extras added to a set, they were stand-ins for my story, replaceable at best, disposable at worst. I wasn’t the listener I pretended to be. I was a collector of my own stories and a curator of the rambler’s lifestyle.

I read the quote over and over like it was divine scripture. With the flick of his pen, the author pinned me to the wall with a perfectly placed arrow. I saw the shaft protruding from my chest, fletchings ablaze; the nock was still warm from its contact with the bow string; the arrowhead splintering the wall at my back. I lifted my eyes and found his gaze in my imagination. “You want clarity?” he asked. “Here it is.”

I ran to my notebook and scribbled the quote. As I read the words repeatedly, it felt more and more like an epitaph for the last 22 years of my traveling life. I’d been a thin breeze blowing across the land and occasionally coming close enough to brush the cheek of another. Then I was gone. There were a few times I’d stopped and really gotten to know people: Ecuador, Colombia, Palestine, Algeria, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. I took huge gulps and healthy pauses in these places, hellbent on hearing the stories of the people I met. But this was fractional, a sliver of my travels, and it was clear to me that things had to change. Meaningful travel—where the exchange of life between parties was mutual—was infinitely more important than collecting passport stamps and a wide vocabulary. 

“As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.” 

There’s no running from these words, no hole where I can bury them, no pill I can swallow to pretend like they don’t exist. I’ve asked for clarity, and here it is. Now, I must figure out what to do with it.