Why Travel Still Matters: Slow Journeys, Fast Minds, and What Screaming Babies Can Teach Us

"In an age of acceleration, going at human speed suddenly begins to look like sanity and freedom." - Pico Iyer.

I couldn’t kill a baby. At least, that’s what you tell yourself six hours into your red-eye flight. One of those hours you spend waiting for the plane to take off and level out so you can recline your chair 5 degrees. It does nothing to keep your head from bobbing around and freezing in neck-contorting paralysis. The aches between your shoulder blades don’t compare to whatever sadistic excuse for a seat is doing to your tailbone, but somehow, you enter a stage of sleep. Or maybe you’re in business class, and you’ve managed to fall asleep already. Either way, the baby two rows ahead of you starts crying for thirty minutes straight. Then, just as you think it’s over, the baby—which you now refer to as ‘it’ — starts up again. You start to question what you’re capable of.

Somebody needs to get rid of this baby. Or at least put it in the cargo department.

But you’re not a bad person, and you would never act on those thoughts.

You endure.

The first train from the airport is on time, but the second one has a 30-minute delay, not enough time to explore the area. You sit your culo on the metal bench as you try and fail to ignore the sweaty clothes stuck to your body. Or maybe you decide to get a taxi or even an Uber Lux, but now you’re stuck in traffic for two hours because of an accident on the road. A cyclist took a wrong turn, causing a driver to swerve out of the way and hit a tourist bus that took out five pedestrians as it rolled and killed 20 more people trying to get to where they wanted to go.

…So why travel?

Why We Travel: Beyond the Frustration

To answer that question, I spoke with Dr. Matthew Niblett and Dr. Kristine Beuret. Matthew is the director of the Independent Transport Commission, Britain’s foremost independent transport and land use think tank. Kristine Beuret is a social scientist specializing in transport and urban policy, and she’s the Director of Social Research Associates. Together, they started whytravel.org and wrote the book Why Travel?

In the biological chapter by Charles Pasternak, we review that around 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens left Africa and spread the globe from there. Even when we started settling down around 10,000 years ago, we kept traveling. Why?

The Innate Drive: Curiosity & Cognition

Curiosity. Many animals are curious, and by stating travel is, in part, driven by curiosity and that travel makes us human, I’m not saying this to separate us from other animals. If anything, separating ourselves from animals and nature makes us less human. That said, our bipedalism, large brains, dextrous hands, and speech help to explain our ability to travel to more places than any other animal on Earth.

It all started with our ability to stand up straight, scan the horizons, and seek more food, shelter, people, and information. According to Biederman and Vessel, only hunger urges, harm avoidance and the need to find a mate distract us from information-craving. We love to learn, even though our flawed educational systems sometimes make us forget that.

We need to remember that play aids our learning. For instance, when taking a new track to travel out of curiosity, our brain simultaneously remembers the details of that route better than if we had taken it out of necessity or by command.

Not only does being placed in an enriched environment aid brain cell growth, but researchers also found participants asked to solve a problem they are told originates from a faraway place give more creative solutions to the problem than those participants who believe the problem is local in origin.

Another experiment by Madden and Galinsky shows that people who had spent time living outside their own countries were less fixed in their thinking and more able to accept and recombine novel ideas. This was evidenced by the fact that they were more likely to solve the Duncker candle problem given only a box of thumbtacks and a candle and told to fix the candle to a wall (you need to divine that the tack box can be used as a shelf). In other words, wandering and curiosity weave into every facet of our intellect.

It is no accident that many companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Kraft, and Colgate were founded, in part, by immigrants. In fact, people born outside the US are more than twice as likely as Americans to start a business there.

Slow Travel: Benefits for Body, Mind, and Planet

It’s not only our minds and bank accounts that benefit from travel, but our bodies. Endorphins released when exercising are our natural “opioids” and ways of getting “high.” But I doubt I need to get into all that. I’m not here to convince you to exercise but to convince those who already love to exercise to slow travel.

Slow travel is all about taking the time to connect to the people and culture without rushing to get to your destination. Regarding physical health benefits, not rushing can mean walking, biking, or sailing—in other words, using your muscles to get you around.

It always surprises me that environmentalists/tree huggers/rainforest buddies/perroflautas, or whatever you want to call us, have a reputation for being soft. It takes a whole lot more grit to get to where you need to go sustainably than unsustainably. First off, we shouldn’t stereotype people, but since stereotypes aren’t going anywhere, it should be the people lacking the mental and physical toughness to bike to work when it’s raining, don’t like the train because it’s uncomfortable, and can’t plan ahead of time to take public transport who have a reputation for being “soft.”

Rhetoric issues aside, thanks to Why Travel and my interview with Niblett and Beuret, I understand that entirely cutting out air travel and cars is unrealistic. If everyone who takes planes were suddenly to take trains, the railroad systems couldn’t handle the demand. And there are situations and places when a vehicle is your only option.

If everyone could take the train, bus, bike, etc., instead of planes and cars, we’d have a healthier population and environment. But of course, sometimes you need to take a plane to explore faraway destinations, and taking the occasional flight doesn’t stop you from benefiting from slow and deep travel.

You can slow down and keep an eye on your carbon footprint once you get to the place you want to be. And once there, don’t be a dick who hops from hotspot to hotspot to be all like, “Look where I’ve been” on Instagram. Slow the hell down and put your ego to the side.

The True Meaning of Deep Travel

As travel writer Pico Iyer has said:

"Deep travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty."

And he’s right.

When I’m researching the ‘top 10 ____,’ searching for affordable flights that work around my schedule, getting patted down at security, dealing with customs, and stuck in some generic, over-priced restaurant in an airport, I don’t feel free—and I feel more at home in airports than most people.

I feel free biking through different cities, hiking through various landscapes, and meandering through a city I have yet to discover.

Slow travel goes beyond the environmental, economic, and health benefits. It even goes beyond the words of Mark Twain when he said:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness… Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Slow travel not only increases empathy and understanding of other people, but opens you up to whatever connects us; whether you want to call it God or the universe, travel connects us to what we can only hope to explain through art.

“Wander where there is no path,” tells the Zhuangzi.

Since the goal of life is losing one’s desires and joining with the flow of the universe, which is always in flux, a state of indefinite and infinite travel is almost a utopian end in itself. For me, this is what I strive for when I travel—even though not striving often gets me there.

For others, it might be connecting to God and others within their community. According to the Alliance of Religions and Conservation and the UN World Tourism Organisation, about 200 million pilgrimage journeys are made annually (perhaps considerably more).

Whether or not you’re religious, humans want to connect to something greater than themselves. Whether that is shown through artistic or philosophical movements, travel is always at the forefront.

We tell each other not to “rock the boat” in a difficult situation, that we’re “at a crossroads” when we need to “choose which path to take.” Other examples mentioned in Why Travel include the French “Y aller par quatre chemins” (to get there by four paths), which means avoiding the core of the subject in a discussion, and in Russian “галопом по Европе” (galloping across Europe) means to do something hastily.

When it comes to art, we just need to think about some of the most famous books, poems, and stories of all time: Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, Divine Comedy, and key journeys from The Bible. None of these books support quick “must-see” travel, but rather human journeys.

The best things in life take time, whether that’s reading and understanding a book like Ulysses (or so I’ve been told. I still haven’t managed), having good sex, cooking a delicious feast, creating solid relationships, or travelling.

In the age of acceleration, we all need to slow down.

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Question for You:
Matthew, Kristine, and I talked about the SNCF’s experiment to redesign train cars by ambiance (work, social, play) instead of by class. Do you think we should organize travel by mood instead of money?

Leave a comment. Or better yet—take the long way home and think about it.

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