At some point every summer, people start complaining about travel. They grumble about delayed flights or trains, traffic snarls, meh food. To hear them talk, it seems like their trips don’t actually begin until they arrive at their destinations and put on their hiking shoes or swimsuits.
All that complaining makes my teeth hurt. These are First World miseries that cloud the ability to embrace the idea that detours on a journey can be your happiest memories.
Years ago, for instance, I had to travel a multi-leg flight over 3,781 miles from Boston to Wrangell, Alaska. The planes grew smaller with each connection. The weather worsened. When the last plane was grounded in Ketchikan due to mechanical failure, I decided to travel the rest of the way by ferry rather than chance waiting for a mechanic who might or might not show up from Anchorage. The 6-hour ferry ride turned out to be spectacularly beautiful, traveling along the Inside Passage and delivering the astounding sight of bald eagles diving for salmon.
More recently, I drove with my daughter from Boston to Sacramento, California, where she moved for a new job. It was an epic road trip, with stops in iconic cities like Nashville and Santa Fe. I treasure the memories my daughter and I made together. But one of my favorite moments actually took place with a stranger in the Sacramento airport.
When I sat down in one of the restaurants to eat lunch before my flight, a woman came over to take my order. “How’s your day going, sweetie?” she asked.
The warmth in her voice made me burst into tears. “Not so great, actually,” I said. “I’m leaving my daughter here for her new job and flying home. I miss her already.”
To my astonishment, the waitress started crying, too. She confessed that her adult son had also recently left home for a job in Arizona, as she grabbed a handful of napkins for us to mop our faces. “We raise our kids to leave us, and when they do, it breaks our hearts,” she said. We hugged before I left.
What, really, is the point of traveling?
Sure, we want to explore new places. It’s a joy to relax on a vacation from stressful work or school or to check things off our bucket lists: architectural wonders, museums, birds.
But another compelling reason to travel is to learn how to enjoy those liminal spaces where we might have unexpected hours alone or encounter new people. These serendipitous experiences are increasingly rare in our hamster wheel of an online world. In the Amsterdam airport recently, I ate in a restaurant where you ordered and checked out using a QR code. The waitstaff’s only job is to ferry your food from the kitchen to your table, where they drop it off and scurry away.
On my last visit to San Francisco, we sometimes took driverless Waymos, eliminating those chance conversations with taxi, Uber or Lyft drivers where they might tell you about putting a child through college, a previous career as a prizefighter (true), or their favorite food trucks in a particular city. Even in the Boston Aquarium, where everything is geared toward educating families, the cafeteria has a system where you place your food on a platform that rings it up for you. Efficient, but creepy.
Efficient travel too often comes at the cost of missing out on experiences that teach you the essential lesson that happiness is a choice. In my late 20s, I spent six months backpacking around India, Nepal and Southeast Asia. I would board a train or bus supposedly going to a certain destination at a given time, only to be waylaid by mudslides, flat tires or a stubborn water buffalo. I learned to put aside my frustration and pass the time by talking to fellow travelers, reading or writing in a journal. Time became so fluid that I sometimes lost track of what day it was.
The Balinese have a phrase to describe the elastic nature of time: “Jam karet,” which literally means “rubber time.” To them, the quality of the time you spend is more important than the manmade construct of time constraints. In other words, if you can let go of your expectations of what the journey “should” be, you’re much more apt to embrace whatever experiences you might be gifted along the way.
The next time your temper flares over a change in schedule, an annoyingly long line, or having to spend the night unexpectedly in a strange city, consider this: You are right where you are at that moment. What you do with that moment is up to you.
Subscribe to Cog’s weekly newsletter. Essays on friendship, love, loss, parenting, politics and more, from Boston’s NPR.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
