Urge For Going

Urge For Going

“...before there can be change there must be discontent.” - Paul Bowles


"...I get the urge for going but I never seem to go." - Joni Mitchell



the Grand Tour, the World Traveler, the romantic notion of a gypsy expatriate flitting through Europe and Northern Africa. This was me in my youth, this was a lot of us, still many of you. But this never happened for me. I did not travel far and wide, I did not become a citizen of the world, I did not lose my sense of home outwardly and become this artistic vagabond I fancied I should, nay, would become.

I think a lot about travel sometimes. It often is associated with feelings of guilt for not doing more of it. In our idealized notions of life, we are told we should travel, that it is good for you. Indeed. Likely it is very educational, broadening, perspective changing. For me, it was always a lack of money, or said money, when faced with choosing between a new guitar or a trip for two weeks, I would always choose the guitar. That trip would take me somewhere else for fourteen days, but that guitar could write songs and I could go anywhere I wanted with those.

It sounds a lot like an excuse, I know, but in preparing this slightly absurd surrealism about someone who wants to travel but never seems to get up to do it, I thought a lot about what it means to me and why I don't do it more. For one, I am afraid of flying. I have done so several times, but it's never been a pleasant experience. Also, the world, as I get older and hopefully wiser, seems far more threatening to me than it did in my youth. But more than outward issues like that, I think my take on the well-travelled vs. the comparative homebody is this: you tend to desire travel more when your childhood was well-funded, functional, and very traditional. Those who did not have those experiences, for whom home life was erratic and less than constant, and I can only speak for myself really, perhaps value the fleeting sense of home we strive to establish so much that the idea of leaving it, becoming uprooted for a time, is slightly unsettling. It could also be as simple as the reverse too: you were raised traveling a lot, so you continue to do so in your life as an adult. Or you're bored. Or you want to see everything. Whatever the reason is to do it, the circumstances have not conspired to propel me headlong into the world and see everything there is to see.

It need not be analyzed too deeply. Suffice to say, this is a somewhat autobiographical image of a man who, at least for now, chooses to see the world from a comfortable vantage point, who perhaps will someday seek more direct contact with it, but for now is content in his little patch of home, and has no immediate desire to plunge into the seeming bedlam abroad.

model: Ben