Each week, I’m going to be sharing some things I’ve learned from stuff I’ve read. Topics may range from philosophy to sports and anywhere in between.
If you go to a priest, monk, or rabbi for any sort of life direction, you’ll probably gain some flavor of the same advice: detach yourself from the material world and get more in touch with your spiritual life.
Buddhists, for example, say that suffering in this life comes from too many material attachments. Christians, meanwhile, will refer to Jesus’ statement about how it’s easier to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s Kingdom.
And this advice jives well with the secular world as well. You would be hard-pressed to find a story, in any culture, where the protagonist solves his problems by becoming more invested in his career, bank account, or investments. As a matter of fact, those things are usually the problem to begin with.
Yet, one can go too far eschewing the things that are of this world. If we look at any generic story with our run-of-the-mill protagonist and his problems, an unlikely resolution to that story is the protagonist becoming a cloistered Benedictine monk.
My point is that there’s some middle ground between being a full-throated capitalist with a maxed-out credit card and over-the-top asceticism. I don’t think that the middle ground can be defined by some dollar amount or some fixed percentage of your post-tax income. Rather, I think that the middle ground comes from spending money in a targeted way on certain worldly things, particularly travel.
There’s something about travel to me that separates it from spending money on a fancy dinner or dropping lots of cash on designer clothes. It brings me back to something that was said in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about time:
“A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that’s the time that seems long… Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
We all know this to be true intuitively. When I travel, I often end up cramming months’ worth of experiences into a single week. For example, a written summary of my two-week trip to Singapore in 2019 would probably be longer than that of my past twelve months in this pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, those two weeks in Singapore flew by in the moment, but in hindsight, those two weeks seemed really long, given all the things I did over there.
And given how fleeting our lives are, travel’s magical, elongating effect on time is a powerful thing for us to take advantage of.
Another point in travel’s favor is that it’s consistent with the wisdom of major religions. Yes, we are all taught to not be too attached to the material world, but we are also taught to marvel at God’s creation. And maybe for some people, they can marvel at the Universe from within the confines of a monastery or temple.
But for most of us, experiencing the world through travel is the shortest path to awe.
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