path: root/unused/ennui.txt

It's difficult to describe the sense of freedom that comes from traveling through the world, unleashed from all the responsibility or worry of normal suburban/urban life in 21st century America. The perpetual motion of open-ended travel is liberating in a way that few other things can really match. 

Traveling long term is also a kind of curse though. Don't forget that exile was once a favorite punishment for all sorts of crimes in more than a few cultures. Cain, perhaps western culture's most famous criminal, was condemned to wander the earth aimlessly as a punishment for murdering his brother. The worst thing his culture could conceive of was to strip him of a home and set him adrift in the world.

I think there's an important lesson there for travelers. Long term travel that has no sense of purpose, no mission, no project behind it inevitably leaves you lost, adrift in the world, wandering aimlessly, trapped in a pit of ennui. 

Do it too long and you'll find that ennui, no matter who you are. It is too easy to let your brain slip into a mindless blur of cocktails and sunsets that leave your mind limp as a lime floating in yesterday's beer. It's okay to do that for a while, but too long and you'll throw in the towel or turn to one of those sad, soused expats staring blankly at the wall behind the bar all day.

If you want to do more than just travel for a bit, if you want to make a life on the road, to make a life of exploring the planet, you need to work at it bit. In my experience you need two things to really make it work. 

The first thing you need is a project, a purpose to drive you, no matter how quixotic or strange it might be. Almost every long term traveler I know has something that drives them. Often these projects are the reason I know of them. I know people who [make movies](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCirYAT7CafNatSyJH3-O4pQ), many [others](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/) [who write](https://www.vagabondjourney.com/), others who [photograph](http://charlenewinfred.com/journal/), others who [paint](https://expeditionaryart.com/blog/), others who are [avid birdwatchers](https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/), others who take work along the way, traveling chefs, traveling teachers, archaeologists -- anyone who travels for an extended period of time has something driving them, even if it's nothing more than a desire to show their children the world.

For me it's usually several things, but the obvious public one is this website. I have been writing for this site more or less steadily since 2003. I've managed to put down over 280,000 words here, most of which I can even re-read without wanting to punch myself in the face, which is more than I can say for most of the writing I've been paid to do.

I don't have a real reason for doing any of this beyond the fact that it's an neverending project that I enjoy and that gives a certain sense of purpose to my days on the road. I don’t make luxagraf because I travel, I also travel because I make luxagraf. The two go hand in hand, they are in fact very much the same project. 

The second thing you need for a successful and happy life on the road is a little more nebulous, but I like to define it as an acute sense of place and your place in places.

You have to make sure you're in places that move your soul, places that fill the spiritual hunger inside you that sent you traveling in the first place. The point to existence isn't to accumulate stuff you know (and places can be stuff just as much as stuff can be stuff) the point to existence is to fully develop who you are. To make that task easier it really helps to be in places you love.

But I don't just mean places you love in the sense that pretty much everyone loves the beach. I mean places that you go to and you immediately feel at home there for whatever reason you can't really put your finger on. I believe this is actually a sense you can develop, the ability to feel what once might have been called the vibe of a place. I don't know whether that energy is a result of human experience in a place, some kind of innate energy of a place, some sort of being that occupies a place or, most likely, some combination of all those things. 

Once you know how to tap into and sense of the vibe of a place you'll be well on your way to making your travels a much more enjoyable experience. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one that I've had the most success with is a kind of mediation, but not the sort of meditation you're probably familiar with. I've tried that, emptying your mind and whatnot. There's value in that, but it's never really led anywhere for me.

I mentioned in [a recent post][1] that I often spend a good bit of time "doing nothing". Certainly more than I used it. Early on on this trip we ran around and did things. And sometimes we still do, but I would say less than we used to. These days, so long as it's a wild enough spot, we're happy hanging around camp, walking whatever trails or seashore might be around and generally doing "nothing". Sitting still and observing the world around. 

In the post linked above the "nothing" we did is stare out at the sparkling waters of Pensacola's East Bay, but it could be anything really. I spent hours watching the pine forests of Colorado, the deep woods of Mount Shasta, the deserts of the southwest, the rocky stream beds of Utah, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. We stare at campfires almost every night. 

But watching the world, observing the natural environment around you isn't really doing nothing. It took me quite a while to internalize that, even if I might have *said* it from the beginning. I've come to recognize that there's a big difference between saying something and actually knowing it through experience. And staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happen that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.

I also think it offers a practical way to get a sense of a place by learning to pick up the vibe it has. I find the relatively easy in cities, more difficult out in nature which has larger, deeper patterns that are harder to pick up on. 







I remembered that the first day we were in California. We drove through Redding and I started to get cranky. My wife says I was cranky the rest of the time as well. I believe it. California puts me on edge. There is no real rhyme or reason to it. I've tried to trace out what it is, but it's nothing specific, it's nothing you can pin down. It's a place I don't have a place in, I never have and I never will. Simple as that.

Sometimes you end up in places where you are not happy for one reason or another and you can't leave them. That's when traveling gets hard and people end up throwing in the towel. Like I almost did in California.