Travel Without Travel

What the adventure of two children can teach us about the true meaning of travel.

In the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, a terrible famine sweeps through the land, leaving food in short supply. Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother convinces their reluctant father to abandon the children in the woods to save resources. Overhearing the plan, Hansel leaves behind a trail of bread crumbs when they are led into the forest the following day. However, once abandoned, Hansel realizes the trail of bread crumbs was eaten by birds. Hansel and Gretel are lost.

They wander aimlessly until a beautiful snow-white songbird leads them to a house with gingerbread walls, sugar windows, and a cake roof. Hungry and exhausted, Hansel and Gretel begin to eat the house. While gorging themselves, a witch emerges from the house, invites them in, treats them to a tasty meal, and offers a place to rest for the night. Hansel and Gretel graciously accept and slip into heavenly sleep.

The following morning they are rudely awoken. The witch locks up Hansel—planning to fatten him up for a feast—and forces Gretel to work as her slave. Fortunately, thanks to a combination of cleverness on their part and stupidity on the witch’s, Hansel and Gretel manage to escape and find their way back home.

Wait—what does this have to do with travel without travel (whatever that means)? Well, it turns out Hansel and Gretel’s adventure ties into the topic of travel quite well, at least the travel we’ll be discussing here. Learning the true meaning of travel depends on a blossoming that frees us from selfish misconceptions, much like how Hansel and Gretel freed themselves from the witch’s illusive house.

So, we’ll be following Hansel’s breadcrumbs, nibbling some folk wisdom along the way. Let’s travel, shall we?

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Travel is movement that molds that which moves into something new.

Travel is movement that moves the self.

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Like Hansel and Gretel after their abandonment, wandering through life without purpose leaves us vulnerable to lures that lead us to aimlessly sit, sip, snack, stare, and scroll—enticed by an abundance of delightful, low-effort rewards.

One such lure offers an instructive lesson in the concept of travel without travel, its irony being so thick and tangible that it provides the perfect foothold to start understanding the differences between movement and travel. Behold, the gingerbread houses of the vacation market: resorts and cruises. Here, customers tend to sit, sip, snack, stare, and scroll—just as they would at home—cooped in a cradle that separates consumer from culture.

A song played in two different cities carries with it the same melody and rhythm. While its echoes may move through different streets, the identity of the song hasn’t moved. So, in a way, the song hasn’t traveled. Why, then, do we think those who go on vacations, yet carry with them the same melodies and rhythms of life, have traveled?

Little travel occurs when leisure is spent as it would be at home. Resorts and cruises actually reinforce existing identities, coddling and cosseting customers with gluttonous idleness and normalizing it, creating herds of people that engage in the same banal habits. This makes it more difficult for people to travel, trapping them in hedonic ruts.

If travel does occur during these getaways, it’s during rare moments when customers venture from the confines of their crib and encounter authentic culture, that is, one that doesn’t run through scripts to appease them. For most, however, the only real travel that occurs on these types of vacations are skin tones on the color wheel.

To travel, your identity and conception of the world must move with you. Travel doesn’t begin on the plane or the ride from the airport, where we’re likely to do the usual sit, sip, snack, stare, and scroll—although it could if you strike up a conversation with a stranger or glance out the window and genuinely soak in the view. You must be transformed for travel to occur. And not some superficial transformation, like sporting a new tan or posting a new photo.

Speaking of which, another bastion of irony are vacation photos. To be clear, it’s not that photos negate travel; it’s just that they don’t actually provide reliable evidence of travel like they seem to. Photos can’t really tell us whether someone actually connected with their surroundings, or if their surroundings connected with them. In fact, photos often indicate some form of disconnection.

For example, when an attraction is used to accessorize a photo, its beauty is overshadowed by self-interest, reduced to a tool for enhancing the people in the frame. The beauty is thus lost. Likewise, when posing for a photo, we pause reality and play the unreality of running through a script. And when we drift from reality it’s easy to get lost. As we imagine how good a moment will look in the future, we unknowingly distance ourselves from the present moment itself.

This is the irony of trying to capture moments. The wonder of the present is that it can be experienced; but its tragedy lies in its fleeting nature—it cannot be fully captured. Like a butterfly, the present flutters away when we try to catch it. Rather than try to make a moment yours (which it will never be), sometimes it’s best to restrain yourself and have the courage to accept the moment as it is. And who knows, the butterfly might settle on you, leaving a deeper, transformative imprint in your memory.

To travel, experience must move you. Considering travel in this way reveals a liberating realization: traversing long distances isn’t required to travel. Long distances can help; but really, the key to travel lies in the adaptation of body and mind itself.

The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pairs of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.

— Marcel Proust

To escape the witch’s house, Hansel and Gretel had to put their bodies and minds to the test—Hansel, by tricking the witch into thinking he hadn’t fattened yet, and Gretel, by playing dumb about the oven before shoving the witch inside.

Described as having impeccable animalistic smell, but beady red eyes that couldn’t see very far, the witch’s near-sightedness led to her demise. The witch lives in each of us; we all have a tendency of pursuing delightful sensuality while losing sight of our future. Witches live outside of us too, like limbic capitalists who lure in consumers with beautiful song birds (advertisements) and engorge them with addictive products that lead them nowhere. The witch is symbolic of hedonism (short-sighted sensual pleasure), and, regardless of whether it comes from within or without, hedonism reinforces the chains of attachment that prevent travel.

To break those chains we must adapt like Hansel and Gretel did.

Exercise of body and mind provides a vital means of travel. A balanced physical routine addresses mind and body, channeling attention through the body as it slogs through the turbulent groans of endurance, surges down the intense chutes of strength, and floats along the gentle eddies of stretching, all outpouring into an ocean rich in travel. Earnest physical activity is crucial for a colorful life.

Learning offers a different kind of travel—one (seemingly) without physical movement. However, while the body mostly remains still, an engaged mind embarks on an electric journey through neural pathways, weaving through webs of dendrites and synapses, racing down myelinated shafts of the brain.

Through reading, we traverse time and space, historical texts and science fiction whisking us away to the past or future of distant lands. Gazing into the stars, we journey through space and back in time, our eyes receiving photons that traveled thousands of years from quadrillions of kilometers away. Curiosity carries us down branches of understanding, where questions of what, how, and why—such as why a crystal glints with rainbow hues or why the feathers of a black bird gleam bluish-green—lead us through a dense history of evolutionary foliage whose roots entrench themselves in the soils of truth.

Activity births travel; passivity kills it. This is why resorts and cruises tend to be travel-barren; each encourage passive grazing on confined pastures of pleasure. It’s also why many photos or videos provide no evidence of travel; usually, they evidence the passive pursuit of self-infatuation.

Another example of passivity can be found in commuting, especially by car. The car moves, but the body remains still while the mind drifts elsewhere—a perfect example of movement without travel. Not only that, but most of us drive as fast as we can get away with, focused more on where we’d rather be than where we are; if we were content with where we were, we wouldn’t feel the need to speed. The tragic irony is that, with this mindset, we never truly arrive, always pushing presence to some distant point in the future.¹

Oddly enough, genuinely sitting back and savoring a moment produces profound travel. Melting into a moment is far from passive, requiring a healthy dose of active restraint from distracting whims. Not only that, but as we melt, so do the boundaries separating being and time itself. And this exchange between being and time brims with activity.

Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.

— Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Ch. 47)

After narrowly escaping the witch’s house, Hansel and Gretel face the challenge of finding their way out of the dark woods. As they wander, they come upon a big body of water. Just then, Gretel notices a gentle white duck swimming nearby and kindly asks if it can help them across. The duck agrees.

Notice the contrast between the duck and the songbird encountered earlier—the one that first lured Hansel and Gretel to the witch’s house. On the one hand, there’s the snow-white songbird. Despite looking and sounding beautiful, its relationship with Hansel and Gretel is shallow and distanced, flying ahead of the children. Where does that relationship leave them?

The lesson is clear: Be wary of lusting for beauty in the absence of intimacy. This has obvious examples in the context of sexual relationships, but it applies to nearly every facet of life. The increasing reach of internet platforms, for example, is wonderful at delivering engaging information and entertainment to wider audiences, but terrible at cultivating intimacy between creator and consumer, leaving each with a sense of emptiness.

The duck, on the other hand, welcomes each child onto its back. By doing so, the duck symbolizes love. Our love towards others is measured not by what they do for us, but by what we do for them, and the humble duck offers service with gentle intimacy. While Hansel and Gretel chase after the bird, drawn by its distant beauty, the duck allows them to sit close, cradled in its soft feathers, their arms gently wrapped around its neck.

The bird and duck provide us with another valuable lesson: We do not travel towards goodness; we travel by way of it.

Let’s return to melting into moments. Just as Hansel and Gretel rode the duck, each of us traverses an ocean of experience, riding a ship whose knife-edge bow cuts into the waves of present, slicing between past and future. And since time always flows forth, we are always moving. Therefore, travel is always available to us—it’s just a matter of whether we tune in to this movement.

As the sharp bow of our ship pushes forward, it slices through waves of all sizes, much like the different rhythms we experience in life.

The surface of the ocean is like our awareness of the present—instantaneous and alive with sensation. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches bring us closest to the now through sense perception. Awareness of thoughts—a sort of psychic perception—is another way to connect to the present, but it comes with a risk. When we cling too tightly to thoughts, we’re pulled away into the past or future, losing our intimacy with the moment.

Just below the surface, our ship glides through the capillary waves of daily life. The sun rising in the east and setting in the west while westerly winds carry clouds from west to east. The chorus of birds in the morning and the soft chirps of crickets at night. The warm satiation that follows fresh meals. The passing nuzzle of a curios dog’s wet nose and a shared smile with their owner during a neighborhood stroll.

These daily ripples sit atop larger seasonal waves. The showers in spring whose raindrops release perfumes of wet soil and drum on flower petals. The buzzing cicadas and darting dragonflies of warm summer evenings. The crunch of fallen leaves and their earthy fragrance in autumn. The silent snowfalls of winter.

Beneath it all pulses the swell of your life. The wonderous naivety of childhood. The taste of freedom in young adulthood, followed by the creeping dread of growing responsibility. The trenches of servitude dug in adulthood that later become channels through which love and purpose pour. And, in elderhood, the slowing down and savoring of life’s richness as it nears its end.

Only through profound noticing—the rawest expression of love—can we touch the full spectrum of waves that pattern our lives on this beautiful planet. So, pay attention. It comes with a price—effort—but so does all travel. The reward is a deeper closeness to a home that has always been there.

Hansel and Gretel found their way home. Will you?

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.

— James P. Carse

1. Commuting doesn’t end at the car or the train ride. We commute through life.