Travel as a State of Mind
My current job allows me serious freedom and serious “vacation time.” So as I get serious about selling overpriced textbooks for the Fall 2012 semester, I also get serious about thinking about what to do with my time this summer.
With this serious thinking comes the inevitable question for the 4th time round now:
Where in the World will Kevin Go? Where should he go?
Summer 1: Grosse Pointe City Pool, the birthplace of my life (swam in this pool 3 days after birth)
Summer 2: Rome, the birthplace of Western Civilization
Summer 3: Barcelona, the most urban beach experience possible
Summer 4: ___________, the most __________ in the whole wide world
When I started flirting with this idea in my head, I had a depressing thought:
nothing in the world looks all that intriguing to me right now.
What do you do when no area of the world strikes your current fancy? Where do you escape to, to feel special? To feel unique? I think I’m reaching the end of the road of being able to escape somewhere for some trip of exploration to ‘find myself.’
I’ve found myself wishing I could just go on some globe-trotting trip to find myself. I wish the True Kevin Krease was hidden in some bookshelf or at the bottom of some cafe cup in some far flung abode on the other side of the world. Then, all I’d need to do would be to buy a plane ticket there, and kindly ask for a flat white in that cafe and find myself at the bottom. I think he’d say “o well hello there Big Kev, so glad you finally found me! If you had only come sooner we could have avoided that whole longing process you had to go through! But worry no more, you’ve arrived!”
While I’ve read numerous books on the notion of longing and living in tension, having to actually participate in this reality is quite frustrating. Our desires are so contradictory! I thought if I knew about this whole tension thing, then it’d make it actually easier to endure and work through. Bahahaha silly Kev, what were you thinking?
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Travel for me is mostly always about exploration. I love planning the basics, but then just exploring streets and talking to strangers in a strange land. I don’t really enjoy most tourist sights that are in guidebooks. I prefer talking to the grocery store clerk about the quality of their organic chicken, or chatting up local immigrants selling cheap beer on the beach and inquiring about where they’re taking college classes for free. I love meeting new people.
This love of meeting new people is part of my struggle with living in Detroit. If being a traveler is more a state of mind and life perspective, than it is a competition of traveling to the most far-flung places, then my time in Detroit has been somewhat stifling. The people I meet in Detroit are pretty odd, doing pretty odd things, having lived so far, a pretty odd life. But also, oddly awesome. Being the most ‘normal’ person to ever have lived in Portland for a period of time, I feel at many times out of place in Detroit, which is ironic, because it’s my hometown.
The tension I live in then, is attempting to be a traveler in Detroit, my hometown, and dealing with the acceptance and rejection you encounter in a new land. Sometimes I love it; sometimes I hate it. One constant though is my struggle to leave it. It’s almost as if I feel like a have a right to this land and the future people here and were I to leave, I’d give that up.
Like any good traveler though, we realize that we’ll be back.
When travel is rare, there is a sense of loss when you leave a great place. But when you have a desire to travel and explore and sense you’ll maintain this your whole life, when you leave a great place, you’re excited to rediscover it all over again in the future. Perhaps this is how I need to view Detroit: a city that is my home, that will forever be my home, and one that will change and grow up just like I will.
So rather than feeling a sense of loss if I leave ‘her’, perhaps I should kiss her adieu and say “till next time.”
