My new fortune cookie message tells me to “Take a vacation overseas to enlighten yourself”.
Travel and Enlightenment – What could be better than that?
I now need to decide a) how I need to be enlightened and b) where to go to travel to in order to fulfil that goal.
It has got me thinking about the psychology of travel and what it all means. As you progress through life and no longer need sandcastle type holidays with your children, you can get a bit more selective about where to go. My children are now old enough to climb mountains, or to dive to the depths or to trek miles to far-flung monasteries or to fly high or to sit and talk to locals or to go and work in a school ….
All these things we can do now, but the hope of family group enlightenment is too much to ask of the four of us. I know this from just trying to choose a meal or a restaurant that we all want to go to at the same time – it is impossible. So it would be equally impossible to get all of us excited and enlightened about the same things.
So maybe I should just go somewhere on my own then.
Where?
What do I want to achieve? Do I really want to go on my own?
What does enlightenment even mean? I’m not even sure whether I believe in achieving enlightenment as a higher, more improved state of being, rather than attempting to find it in your normal every day existence. Since the “Mindfulness” explosion it seems we are all aiming for enlightenment in the form of improved health and general well-being, rather than as a means of gaining insight into the nature of things. But I’m not sure – shouldn’t inner peace be a state of being at all times rather than something that requires us to wander the globe searching for it?
Alain De Botton says that “if our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems – that is, issues requiring though be young the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go – though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so single nor so trivial an whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing.
So presumably enlightenment = human flourishing = eudaimonia.
I am still none the wiser on where I need to go to flourish….
Hot? Cold? Challenging? Easy? Physical? Alone? In a crowd? Up? Down? In? Out? Cheap? Expensive? Near? Far?
WHERE? WHAT? HOW?
Going to have to give it some serious thought. The thing is that journeys never lead you where you expect, so how can you plan to achieve enlightenment when sometimes enlightenment can come by a drifting white feather or a child’s smile rather than a flight and a week in a foreign land.
What I do know is that I agree with Mark Twain who says:-
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
