Exactly thirteen years have passed since my six-and-a-half-year around-the-world journey ended. And I sit here musing on the tricks Time plays with me when it comes to the memories of this journey.
The Journey of Yesterday
There is an incredible vividness in the recollection of a long-term journey that surpasses all other memories. I feel as if the events of the journey happened only a week ago. The intensity with which they appear in my mind’s eye, the clarity of vision, even the sounds and smells, are in a class of their own. I often find that I can recall full days of the journey – with all the insignificant events that filled them – or even a series of days with all their details and trivialities.
What is it that gives such permanence to the memories of long-term travel? I think it is the element of being in the present moment and its corollary, that of aliveness. It seems that during those moments I still now vividly recall, I was fully absorbed in the experience – fully present and alive. It seems that there is not only a proportional relationship between living in the present moment and aliveness, but another proportionality between aliveness and memory. Aliveness magnifies and attenuates all experiences, and then deposits them forever in the golden boxes of memory. The more alive one is at any moment, the greater the chances are that in the future, the vividness of the recollection of that moment will be stronger and better preserved in its entirety. This also explains why seemingly insignificant moments have been so well preserved in my memory – it seems I was more alive during those “ordinary” moments. Maybe they were the catalysts to a new opening, or maybe they consolidated something I had just learned but still had not truly absorbed. Or maybe, as I wrote in another essay, the events of our life are not divided naturally into ordinary and extraordinary: Maybe all the events of our life are extraordinary, and it is because of the absence of awareness and the lack of aliveness that we come to experience ordinariness, boredom, or weariness.
The Journey of Decades Ago
In contrast to the vividness of the recollection of so many events of the journey, there is another strange fact: the feeling that the journey occurred further in the past than it did. It feels as if events that happened sixteen or seventeen years ago happened thirty years ago! Although the incidents of the journey have the vividness of events that happened yesterday, in some strange way, they also feel as if they occurred in some distant past, decades before the beginning of the journey.
I have long meditated on this apparent paradox: the vividness of the recollection on the one hand, and the feeling that the journey is old on the other hand. I may propose a theory of why this strange phenomenon occurs: The more one lives in the present moment and feels alive, the more the “content” of each life-incident seems to expand. Because our life is a collection of such moments, we could say that life itself expands. Therefore, a day full of new experiences, replete with new tastes, sounds, and sights – a day in which each new element surprises or even shocks us and takes us into the unknown – feels longer. Maybe it truly is longer! For how does one measure the length of one’s life? Is it by the hands on the clock? If you sleep for three days straight, you are not dead, but are you truly alive? Passively breathing and having all vital functions is not enough.
Our life is the totality of the events and incidents we experience.
The more experiences one squeezes into a day, the longer that day not only seems to be, but actually is: within a fixed time period, “more life” has been lived, so to speak.
Of course, it is not only the quantity of experiences that counts. The quality and intensity of events plays a much bigger role. A traveler experiences strange, surprising things, which have a stronger intensity. A traveler’s days are thus more full than ordinary days, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our memory counts time by the wealth of events and experiences. Because the temporal distance of a past event is measured psychologically by the wealth of events occurring between the present and that past event, the greater the number of the in-between events and the greater their intensity, the further in the past that past event seems to reside. So now, thirteen years after the journey’s end, it feels as if the events at the beginning of the journey occurred more than thirty years ago, because the fuller in-between years of the journey seem to have had a much longer duration!
It is as though time itself has stretched in order to fit in more experiences within the same clock time.
Thus, the journey of six-and-a-half years feels as if it lasted longer and, subsequently, psychologically, its beginning and middle seem to recede further into the past, as if they happened decades ago.
The Journey of Another Life
Not only is the recollection of the journey’s events as vivid as that of more recent events, not only is there a simultaneous feeling of an expansion of time that makes the journey feel as if it happened further in the past than it did, but there is still another even stranger feeling that completes the trio of time-paradoxes: There is a sense that the journey as a whole happened outside one’s normal life and thus outside Time itself. It seems as if the journey belongs to a different dimension of existence than the normal life that preceded and then followed the journey. Now that I live a sedentary life again, living in society and preoccupied with the routines of daily life, there is a feeling that my journey around the world was some type of dream or hallucination. I know it happened, but its hue or texture is of another nature than that of this life I now live. In a sense, it is a tautology to say the journey feels as if it has happened outside of my normal life, for travel-life is not “normal life.” However, the best explanation for this is that while one is traveling, one enters into the travel mode of being, which is vastly different from the mode of sedentary life (and to which I devote a whole chapter in my book Destination Earth). This mode of being pertains to Becoming and is contrasted to the mode of sedentary life that pertains to Doing. Quoting from the book:
“A person living a normal life with a regular regimented timetable, a fixed place of residence and work, a routine taking care of family matters, and occasional holidays once or twice a year, is preoccupied with doing things. He does work, he does shopping, he does socializing. His daily program is full of things to do. […] The traveler has nothing to do. He may choose to sit on a bench in a park all day and simply observe the world pass by. Even while he explores places or interacts with foreign cultures or studies, there is nothing compulsory about these activities. There is nothing he must do or accomplish by some deadline (apart perhaps from some self-imposed but flexible date he may have set for himself to complete his exploration of a country). However, although he is not working in the sense of having a conventional job, and is not doing anything by the usual standards of society, something else is actually going on: With every contact, event, experience that comes into his life, he is transformed.”
The four central elements of this mode of Becoming are: living in the present moment, aliveness (already referred to above), openness to the new and surprising, and an unbounded sense of freedom.
As I see it, there is only one way I can further explore these paradoxes and maybe even resolve them: make a concerted effort to reintroduce the travel mode of being into my present sedentary life.