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travel broadens the mind, duh.
Oct. 18th, 2004 11:27 amI've been thinking about the way we travel. This guy at work just came back from two weeks in Hawai'i, and I'd expected to be able to relate to something from his experience - cause, the whole Hawaiian trip in the spring, fascinating to me, and also opened up some new fields of study I hadn't considered. But not so much. His highlights were all of the "I relaxed a lot and then I saw some nature" variety.
Nature is cool, don't get me wrong. But the nature is restorative. It isn't provocative (for me at least; it is for some). A good travel experience, for me, sparks a million different ideas about the world or yourself. That release of new thoughts is itself restorative and exciting in a way that the usual "kicking back" isn't.
It's possible that people just don't talk about this, but they do experience it. That it isn't part of the language of vacation, or it's too ineffable; I mean, I don't think I can qualify how each trip to my favorite spot in Baltimore changes my mind. Certainly the adventure travelers I've met have to just accept that the experiences, at least, will defy explanation. And I could say, "you know, I've been thinking a lot about colonialism and the nature of statehood and, by the way, Creole languages are really captivating my interest these days", but I'm more likely to say, "yeah, the Bishop Museum was really worthwhile".
Taking a sociocultural perspective, too, there is less of an emphasis on experiences as educational today than there might have been a century ago - and, if you're up on the research on the two income trap, much more reason for the middle class family to need to just kick back in our leisure time.
I have a lot of undeveloped, barely connected thoughts on this subject (did you guess that?). What do you think? That is - what does vacationing, or travel in general, do for you?
Nature is cool, don't get me wrong. But the nature is restorative. It isn't provocative (for me at least; it is for some). A good travel experience, for me, sparks a million different ideas about the world or yourself. That release of new thoughts is itself restorative and exciting in a way that the usual "kicking back" isn't.
It's possible that people just don't talk about this, but they do experience it. That it isn't part of the language of vacation, or it's too ineffable; I mean, I don't think I can qualify how each trip to my favorite spot in Baltimore changes my mind. Certainly the adventure travelers I've met have to just accept that the experiences, at least, will defy explanation. And I could say, "you know, I've been thinking a lot about colonialism and the nature of statehood and, by the way, Creole languages are really captivating my interest these days", but I'm more likely to say, "yeah, the Bishop Museum was really worthwhile".
Taking a sociocultural perspective, too, there is less of an emphasis on experiences as educational today than there might have been a century ago - and, if you're up on the research on the two income trap, much more reason for the middle class family to need to just kick back in our leisure time.
I have a lot of undeveloped, barely connected thoughts on this subject (did you guess that?). What do you think? That is - what does vacationing, or travel in general, do for you?