"Travel is Fatal"

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

— Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It)

Said a hard goodbye to my wife at the airport...  Just got married two weeks ago and I feel slightly despicable for departing on a 12 day trip to Warsaw & Hong Kong and leaving her behind at home...  

The wedding was a glorious, blissful week-long affair and we're both still buzzing from all the love we've been showered with, but now all of a sudden it's back to reality, to the ongoing demands of our respective jobs...  I'm off on another work trip and she's back to teaching school, dealing with the unruly kids of Chicago's Public School system...  sigh...  I knew I'd found the One when the appeal of these trips suddenly diminished sharply, because they mean weeks away from my love, with thousands of miles of distance between us.  The thrill of seeing a new part of the world is eclipsed by the absence of my better half.  I suppose that sounds horrendously sappy, but it's not easy on a relationship when one person is bouncing around the planet and the other is home alone.  This is our karma though, and we're making it work.  Plus, our jobs are paying for our honeymoon, a 3-week trip to Bali in December, so while I may lament her absence at the moment, we're both looking ahead to a well-deserved trip to paradise to close out 2010...   

As I boarded the plane to London, I found myself thinking about the possibility of dying in a plane crash, plunging to a horrible death and missing out on the glorious life awaiting Becky and I.  What a horrible thought, right?  I'm not particularly afraid of flying, but for whatever reason I found myself morbidly ruminating on death as I stared out the window of the plane.  I think about it a lot when I travel, actually...  Perhaps because something inside me dies each time I venture to another country, my preconceptions wither and succumb to the new reality awaiting me at every border crossing.  My perception of reality sheds off me like so much dead skin, to be replaced by a fresh new way of seeing things.  That's really what travel is to me; an exfoliate for the mind & soul.  The Zen folks talk about approaching life with "beginner's mind," an attitude of openness wherein you discard your preconceptions to fully appreciate the experiences you encounter on your journey through life.  Sounds great in theory, but in our everyday lives, we are faced with routine and regimens that make that an increasingly elusive theoretical idea.  Travel, on the other hand, puts it front and center.  The Twain quote above perfectly encapsulates the idea: when you're thrown out of your comfortable surroundings, confronted with people who don't speak your language, and eating food you can't quite identify, things inside you shift.  Becky & I live for that shift, an expansion of perception that comes from incorporating new ideas & realities into your awareness...  I just wish she was here with me to share the experience...