Salon.Com's Wanderlust Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance

Why We Travel, by Pico Iyer "Travel is like love: It cracks you open, and so pushes you over all the walls and low horizons that habits and defensiveness set up." The first time I ever met Don George (then the travel editor for a San Francisco newspaper, though "Wanderlust" was already his motto and his destination), we found ourselves talking just like that, and talking and talking and talking, about the ways in which love quickens a sense of vulnerability and so admits us to states of mind, or areas of knowledge, that we didn't know we had (to that extent travel always moves invisibly). Don in Greece and Paris, I in Thailand and Cuba, and both of us most poignantly and heart-shakingly in Japan, had come to relish the sensation of being spellbound outsiders, wide open to all the beauties of a place, and in a state of excitement for which the only words we could find were those associated with romance and passion. To travel is to trust again, and to believe anew in many of the deeper qualities that get mislaid on the office desk. As the years went on, Don and I found ourselves crossing paths in all kinds of unlikely places, from Marin County, California, to Melbourne, Australia, from a waiting room in Los Angeles International Airport to a dining room beside the swan-filled gardens of the Bel Air Hotel. And whenever we did, our conversation (with a life of its own, it seemed) would pull us back to what really sent us: the trips that made the soul fly. All the journeys we most deeply cherished and remembered were the ones that threw into questionor rotationour notions of home and abroad, and reminded us that home is fundamentally something portable that we carry around inside us (and find when we feel an affinity). "Wanderlust" is in that respect a misnomer: The "lust" part has more to do with surrender than with conquest, and is closer to what I would call gusto; and the "wander" has little to do with crossing borders and getting stamps in one's passport, and everything to do with stretching the boundaries of one's perspective and being drawn constantly to challenge. The person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation. One day I decided to try to summarize some of the conversations Don and I had had, and to formulate why exactly it is that some of us are moved to travel. The essay that follows is, therefore, like all our conversations, both a collaboration and an exploration. Nara, Japan February 2000 We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools againto slow time down and be taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral," since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in largGeorge, Donald W. is the author of 'Salon.Com's Wanderlust Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance' with ISBN 9780679783633 and ISBN 0679783636.