This I Believe

I believe that the journey is the destination.

During the winter of my senior year of high school, I went through an incredibly restless phase. I found myself bored and dissatisfied with my life and its state. I felt as though I was being forced down a path with little or no alternative – you must choose a college, you must choose a major, you must visit these schools, and on and on. I was sick of the monotony of college applications, and the uneasy waiting that followed. I longed insatiably for adventure, for glamour, for the exotic.

One day, searching the web for a homework project, I stumbled upon the blog of a man named Dave. Dave was your typical twenty-something American office worker – except that rather than dreaming of a promotion, he longed to travel the world. So one day, he decided to do just that – he walked into work and resigned. He told his family and friends that he would be going away for a while and bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok , Thailand . The photograph I initially stumbled on was one of hundreds from locations as diverse as Morocco , Amsterdam , Tanzania , New Zealand , Tibet . Dave became my secret idol during those long and dark winter days. Although his journey was something obviously unattainable, the idea of solemn and earnest exploration was not.

The word “journey” has today become somewhat obsolete – it has lost any association with the word “vacation”. A vacation can be planned for you, day by day – a journey cannot. Today's “American Vacation”, the catch-all family trip, is a commodity as nondescript, fabricated, and artificial as a McDonald's Happy Meal. Solicitous TV commercials and travel agents refer to them as “packages”, for that is what they are – pre-wrapped, all-inclusive, napkin-included packages that won't get you messy or stain your clothes. How many times have you heard an ad boast of an exclusive “7 Night Package: Complete with Hotel, Food, and Excursions”? No time to plan your trip? Don't worry – we'll plan it for you! We know what you want, what you enjoy.

There's an old maxim that states, “The tourist sees what he intends to see; the traveler sees what is there.” Why do we trust other people to tell us what is worth seeing and what is not? Even our view of natural landscapes is altered and marred by signs, by tours, by guides – we hear another person's perspective on what is there, and fall into the trap of believing it is the only angle for looking at the world.

Unfortunately, it is not just our vacations we allow to be planned out for us – it is often our entire lives. Instead of a journey, they come down to a series of easily defined destinations, or touch-down points. And rather than celebrating these journeys, we are already looking toward the next, hungry for the next goal, the next destination.

The point is, you do not have to go to Bangkok to experience an adventure. A walk through the forest, people-watching at an airport, meeting a new person- even our typical, everyday lives can become adventures if we allow them. There are always new things to see and discover, to explore. As Marcel Proust once said, “The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeking new eyes.” When asked by eager protégés how they can improve their own writing from experience, many acclaimed writers advise their pupils to “believe their own lives are important, extraordinary.” There's something liberating, empowering in this kind of thinking. To see our own life journey as the hero's journey, to see our friends, family, and loves as integral characters in a poignant drama, our strife as noble, heroic suffering...to see our hometown as the sacred place of spawning to which the hero will inevitably return in the end – all this enables us to realize that our lives are in fact extraordinary, and that our journey is completely and magically unique from anyone that ever has or will live. Exotic locations, beautiful resorts, and mountain climbs won't make us journeyers – the potential to change lies within ourselves.

Eve Marie Blasinsky

Eve Marie Blasinsky