What is the meaning behind our incessant desire to be in motion?

To walk, to drive, to bike or sail.

To float, to fly, to dive or roll and roll…all around this beautiful little blue planet.

Is it the call of adventure, the drug of novelty or are we always looking for something more? What is this something that we seem to be missing? Is travelling an inherent part of our identity?

World traveler 🚗✈️🚊 5 continents, 32 countries and counting!

The classic description of the modern woke person. Beautifully commoditizing the ineffable rewards of undertaking a journey.

“I don’t care about material wealth, I just want to travel!”

Sound familiar?

This is me aged 18. I am in Antwerp, Belgium enjoying a delicious Trappist beer on a beautiful sunlit plaza in the middle of town. It is my first time in western Europe grâce à mes parents, my generous uncle and a juvenile misunderstanding of an APR of 19.99% on a credit card.

I left an insecure, boring teenager and returned a European Man!

What changed? Well I’d probably tell you all about it at the time. I seemed to be unable to talk about anything else. The sights, the sounds! The people, they were so different: they ate differently, spoke differently and they valued very different things. Attractive girls made eye contact in the streets and smiled. Complete strangers were curious about you and your life-story: where did you come from? What’s it like in Canada? Where are you travelling next?

What’s not to like? Travelling was a full-body experience; pouring you out of the stale old beaker of a past identity and tipping off a chemical reaction between you and a foreign new substance now engulfing you in your entirety.

Who am I now?

You ask under your breath as you try to align your three words of Dutch to introduce yourself to yet another stranger.

You are in motion.

Suspending routine, comfort and security you allow yourself to plunge into a new way of experiencing yourself with others. You surrender yourself to the moment and say Ja! to whatever comes next.

Passengers, please step out of the vehicle and have your documents ready for inspection!

Three armed men with machine guns stands outside of the bus as my dad gets out to verify our passports at yet another military checkpoint. We’re travelling through Chechnya in the middle of a scorching summer through what is rather fittingly called the “War Road” Just two years later this will be the center of the most heated battles in the ongoing Chechnyan conflict.

What possessed by family to take a bus from Moscow to Tbilisi through the north Caucuses? I guess I’ll never really now, being six I was more concerned with documenting the entire experience in my colouring book and feeding bright red squirrels with juicy pieces of fresh watermelon. I was in love with the adventure and everything around me was shiny, bright and new.

The mountainous route to Tbilisi at the time was really known for two things: the higher than usual rate of bus accidents; predominantly caused by slipping off of the narrow and windy roads that loop around the mountains like a snake around its frightened prey. The second was the kidnappings. Obviously both of these were not the most ideal outcomes of a family summer vacation.

But here we were, in the middle of Chechnya with a mountain on either side waiting for the armed men to give us the much anticipated go ahead! Who were these men? Well that’s a good question. If they were simply border police, we’d be lucky to slip by with a little less cash in our passports after the inspection. But what if they weren’t?

(For those who aren’t familiar with the context of the passport: I mean bribery)

To this day I remember the tension on that bus as we awaited the instructions from the armed men. Just atop a small hill we could see the rest of their troop, all armed to the teeth staring at our bus with amusement: chatting, smoking, and cracking jokes.

Go ahead! The next checkpoint is in 50 km.

A communal sigh of relief imminently washes over the entire bus, even the obnoxiously loud group of men at the very back of the bus who spent the entire trip under a powerful haze of Chacha (A Georgian wine vodka of sorts) We begin driving again as the peaceful landscapes of the Caucasus mountains quickly lull me back to sleep.

After three days on the road, countless security checks and the eight hours we spent out in the sun waiting for the road to be repaired after it was washed away by the piercing mountain river Terek, we finally made it to Tbilisi. Luck was very clearly on our side.

Blessed be your journey! For every step, a chance.

My great-grandfather and namesake: Alexander Widder was one hell of an unlucky traveler. I was given his first name at birth and eventually after moving to the west, I also adopted his easy to read, English-friendly last name. His entire life is very eventful and worthy of a cinematic adaptation. Born into a family of a Prussian general working for the Tsar in St. Petersburg, back then the capital of the Russian Empire, Alexander was a lawyer by training and a master yachtsman evidenced by all the medals from his racing competitions. It seems that he too loved to float.

But there was one thing he wasn’t able to sail away from: a passionate lover. A young niece of Alexander had apparently fallen madly in love with him and was desperately seeking his attention. As he was unable to return her passions and embarrassed by this family scandal, he attempted to flee to Moscow. To do so he got on the famous over-night train between St-Petersburg and Moscow. Apparently so did his niece. In what I can only imagine as a dramatic Hollywood scene, she found Alexander on the train and shot herself right in front of his eyes.

Real travel moves us.

Leaving an imprint deep in the very fabric of our being, it transforms how we see the world around us. Unable to undo the chemical reaction, we begin to adapt to an ambiguous new state, one were we are continuously in motion.

Alexander’s misfortunes with travel were of course far from over. Fleeing St Petersburg, Moscow and the brewing Russian revolution, he traveled to Harbin, China. Here he found himself in a large community of Russian expats. To this day Harbin has a significant Russian-speaking population with Russian stores, churches and cuisine. Here he met a woman who’s passions he was more than willing to return. They got married and began to share a life together. All was going well until another fateful train ride. Alexander and his wife were travelling to a town near-by when the train went off tracks. The derailing killed his young wife and left him alive, alone and on the move once more.

Where are you going?

Travel may feel like a dizzying illusion born of your confidence in Point A, Point B and the straight line connecting them. What happens when that line breaks?

What happens when you don’t know where to go?

It seems important at this point to mention that physical movement doesn’t necessarily align or guarantee a movement of the soul. You can move and not be moved. Just as the the reverse is equally possible, begging to call on the Henry David Thoreau quote:

“Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.”

How lame, you may think. What ramblings of a boring old man living out in his cabin...

And yet, it seems that his onto something.

The word travel originates from the French word travail meaning “to toil, to labor, to work” So much for your vacation travel plans. Another oxymoron hiding in plain sight.

So if travelling is work, then what are we working on?

Our Instagram accounts?

Lost in a mad dash, we try to shoot, to scan, to drone everything around us in hopes of absorbing all that beauty, culture or history like a Bounty Super absorbent paper towel!

Swooooosh!

But why? If a necessity does not reveal itself must we seek to create it artificially? Does it become a part of fitting in with the Joneses? Or the Kardashians? A house, a car, a large TV and an exotic trip three times a year?

Have we commoditized away an essential part of what it means to be human? To be in motion, to grow, to flee the nest, explore, to set out on our own sacred journey.

In it’s place we left the Vacation

The gap-year

The study abroad program in Spain

A trip to Asia to find ourselves

All in themselves absolutely valid, real and potentially eye opening experiences. But wrapped in the plastic wrapper of modern identity, they begin to wither, fade and expire as anything living naturally would.

It seems that no trip is ever inherently good or bad and throwing any lens of morality into the equation misses the point entirely. And yet assuming that travel is the one-pill-to-cure-it-all…just feels like false advertising.

You look like you need a vacation, pal!

My grand-mother was born in Japan in 1921. A little fun fact I often use in a game of two truths and a lie. The newly-married Widder family left Harbin and was now on vacation in the stunning islands surrounding a city that bring on very different associations in the modern reader. Nagasaki, and the surrounding islands, were best known at the time for their natural beauty, their picturesque mountainous islands and the serene boat rides along the coasts of the East China Sea. My grandmother always recalled her time there with wonder, joy and nostalgia. She would light up and smile when she showed me the black-and-white photographs of her mother in a long traditional Japanese dress.

“She was a beauty!” she would say

And I believed her. Peaking from a small umbrella hung over her left shoulder, she was wearing a playful smile that transported you through time and space and made you feel like you were right there: alive and happy in 1920s Japan.

Real travel leaves a permanent mark

Today, as a fortunate holder of a Canadian passport, I can travel anywhere in the world at a click of a button. Paris? Tomorrow Bahamas? Let’s go right now!

The blitz plan of the modern travel industry feeds on our short attention spans marketing the ultimate journey jam-packed with beauty, history and adventure only for $499!

Again, it seems that no marketing campaign is inherently evil and the only reason it is so consistently effective is because it offers to satisfy a very real need and desire: to embark on a journey.

So off we go. A city per day, get off, look, click, eat, shop, click, go, go, go! We’ve got check marks to tic! No time to waste! I only get two weeks off work.

History is relevant so far as it is grounded in what matters to your specific experience. Civilizations, kings, warriors, battles, buildings, churches, the sacred, the holy, the divine: all rush by like a dizzying kaleidoscope of human endeavor.

One long Instagram story.

It feels that with all our modern richness and technological prowess we’ve somehow managed to become more and more impoverished and dissatisfied with life. No sight is grand enough, no journey spectacular enough to satisfy out scorching thirst for more.

As with everything else in life it stems from a fundamental belief that we, mere humans, have the power to isolate joy from suffering. That we can tear it out like a bad weed; surgically remove it like a tumor and package it up as the ultimate all-inclusive 5-star resort.

A belief that if we just go through the motions, eat that famous tortellini, buy that cheap fridge magnet and get belligerently drunk “like the locals” we will receive the desired effects of this elusive journey everyone is raving about.

And as we descend deeper and deeper into economic, societal and ecological mayhem, the Earth we once called mother!

…continues to choke, continues to burn, to drown…to disappear

And yet we still feel that we deserve!

A vacation on a sunny beach 🏖

We feel entitled to our piece of the journey. And why wouldn’t we?

They all had it, why can’t we?

We are alive. The world is for the living.

Après moi, le déluge!

My great-grandfather Alexander Widder seemed to have had enough of travelling. His life’s circumstances had already sent him across the globe in a dizzying spin. Settling in Harbin, he established a practice, a family and a good reputation. And yet something was missing...

What that was exactly we of course, will never know, but many millions of migrants around the world will secretly confess to a similar feeling: the strong undercurrent pulling at your feet, the deep burning desire to go home.

In the specific example of the Widder family, it was Alexander’s wife and daughter who felt the pull of their country of origin, Georgia. They decided to go home, at least for a little bit… Setting off on long train ride yet again, they said their loving goodbyes not knowing that they would be their last.

Once in Tbilisi, Georgia my great-grand mother was to be arrested on suspicions of espionage and later said to have died of complications in the Gulags. My family hopes that she was killed much earlier. My 14 year old grandmother survived through sheer luck and the incredible generosity of very distant family members who took her into their home raised her as their very own. My great-grand father Alexander never saw his wife or daughter again. Communicating only through letters until his death in the 1950s, he lived out the rest of his life mourning the inconceivable loss he had injured at the hands of the cursed trains of the trans-Siberian.

You can move and not be moved.

You can stand still,

And feel the trans-Siberian plow through the very essence of your being.

All is possible. All is living.

So what does this have to do with my trip to Florida next month?

Nothing? Everything? Something in between?

As you can now probably tell, the topic of travel is something that has consumed an enormous amount of my energy, time and emotion. I continue to be puzzled by the hypocrisies of the modern cult of travel. And yet I’m set to travel at least three times just in the next month. I am going to fly, to drive or take the train to get there. The Earth it feels will be no cooler with or without me.

That thought both numbs and angers me.

But do I still consider my life’s purpose to be a World Traveler? To spread my share of plastic debris to the most remote locations, to take selfie while dangling off of most ancient of artifacts. Probably not.

Here I feel compelled to quote David Henry Thoreau once more:

[or misquote actually not sure if he said this or it was tagged onto him, but the sentiment checks out]

“Live as a traveler at home”

Where every step is a journey, every moment is rich with possibility. Don’t deny the essence that feeds that powerful travel bug we all know and feel; let go and allow yourself to be moved wherever it is that you may be. Be a loving and grateful traveler on your own unique journey through life.

After-all, could it be that the real desire to travel, is a desire to be moved?

- Sanya, Jan 28, 2020