First, thank you for sharing your writing. Any invitation into the tumult of someone else's sense of wonder and struggle with life's inscrutably posed questions is a rare and welcomed blessing.
It was interesting reading about your reflections on a year of successful aestheticism. With my own experiences of long periods of prayer and meditation, fasting, and some of my other forays into that realm of spiritual awakening it's always been my experience that my problems and deep hungers don't get solved or sated, just clarified. It sounds like you're experience is similar. I feel like, at this juncture in my life, I'm no longer looking to fill that void or reach an end of suffering, but rather see myself and the world around me with the clearest eyes I'm able to. Proust's famous maxim, that the point of travel is to return to the place we started but see it with new eyes remains true and relevant.
I'm struck by your conflating of the words "travel" & "travail." My own experience of travel has been inextricably linked with my experience of intense poverty in my late teens and early 20s. I remember the swashbuckling sense of adventure I had boarding a greyhound across the country from Lake Placid NY to LA when I was 18. It was an escape, and one without a safety net. And yet, the nights I spent sleeping on sidewalks and in Denny's booths before I was asked to leave had a self-consciously Kerouacian romance to them, made more real, terrible, and romantic by the fact that I didn't have an aunt like his who I could write to asking for more money when mine inevitably ran out. However, do my joyrneys by bus, train, and riding in strangers cars around various parts of the country with little more than a toothbrush filled paper bag (and no smart phone) constitute "travel?" I'm not sure.
At this point in my life my next travel plans are to go to Amsterdam for the first time this summer with my partner. I'm planning on rereading your essay closer to our trip and see how I feel about it being, as you say, a fanciful, privileged affair or rather a blessing that I should enjoy as someone who is able to enjoy it. Maybe it'll both. We'll see.
First, thank you for sharing your writing. Any invitation into the tumult of someone else's sense of wonder and struggle with life's inscrutably posed questions is a rare and welcomed blessing.
It was interesting reading about your reflections on a year of successful aestheticism. With my own experiences of long periods of prayer and meditation, fasting, and some of my other forays into that realm of spiritual awakening it's always been my experience that my problems and deep hungers don't get solved or sated, just clarified. It sounds like you're experience is similar. I feel like, at this juncture in my life, I'm no longer looking to fill that void or reach an end of suffering, but rather see myself and the world around me with the clearest eyes I'm able to. Proust's famous maxim, that the point of travel is to return to the place we started but see it with new eyes remains true and relevant.
I'm struck by your conflating of the words "travel" & "travail." My own experience of travel has been inextricably linked with my experience of intense poverty in my late teens and early 20s. I remember the swashbuckling sense of adventure I had boarding a greyhound across the country from Lake Placid NY to LA when I was 18. It was an escape, and one without a safety net. And yet, the nights I spent sleeping on sidewalks and in Denny's booths before I was asked to leave had a self-consciously Kerouacian romance to them, made more real, terrible, and romantic by the fact that I didn't have an aunt like his who I could write to asking for more money when mine inevitably ran out. However, do my joyrneys by bus, train, and riding in strangers cars around various parts of the country with little more than a toothbrush filled paper bag (and no smart phone) constitute "travel?" I'm not sure.
At this point in my life my next travel plans are to go to Amsterdam for the first time this summer with my partner. I'm planning on rereading your essay closer to our trip and see how I feel about it being, as you say, a fanciful, privileged affair or rather a blessing that I should enjoy as someone who is able to enjoy it. Maybe it'll both. We'll see.