peace be the journey

Four hours until my plane leaves. (In case you missed the announcement, I’m going to Connecticut for ten months to participate in an internship program. More on that next time.) I wish I were driving rather than flying. I love to watch the landscape change, to observe the continuity. When you fly, it’s over too quickly.

We talked about this once in a class I took on immigration and diasporas. In past centuries, when people made any kind of significant relocation, they traveled by boat or train or covered wagon or on foot. (I think we were talking in particular about the British who went to Australia and New Zealand. To journey from the British Isles to the Antipodes took upwards of three months by clipper ship, or four to five months by steamer. People were going by boat up until the late 1950s, when commercial airliners came into their own.) Despite its numerous difficulties, slow travel offered one advantage: it allowed the emigrants time to mentally and emotionally process the significant changes they were undergoing.

Today, by contrast, we want to get wherever we’re going as fast as possible. When I went to Arizona a few weeks ago, I got bent out of shape when I found out my flight was going to be an hour late. (Never mind the fifteen hour delay it turned into….) But a weekend getaway and permanent (or even semi-permanent) relocation are two very different things.

It still hasn’t hit me that I’m really moving. I don’t know why—it’s not like I haven’t done this before.  Maybe it’s because I have no idea what to expect.

People have been asking me, “So are you excited?” My response: “Not yet, but I will be.” Once I get going, things will be fine. Once the bags are checked and I’m through security and into that mystical no-man’s land called the airport terminal, I’ll start gathering the momentum I’ll need to get through the settling-in process. Once I get started, traveling is fun.

It’s this part right now that I hate, the eve (or in this case the morning) before the departure. I hate it because I have too much time to think—and by think, I mean to second guess myself. (And I wish my body would learn to deal with stress more effectively. I haven’t felt like eating in about two weeks.) But it will pass. It always does.

Now it’s three hours ‘til takeoff. I need to check the dryer and pack a sack lunch. I’ll leave off with an excerpt from the book I was reading last night when I couldn’t fall asleep: A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, by John Brinckerhoff Jackson.

 

 

The European metaphorical use of the words road or way or path emphasized the difficulties encountered by the average wayfarer in the course of his or her journey through life. The most celebrated use in that new sense was in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian, the protagonist, sets out on a special kind of journey, not in order to satisfy daily needs or to conform to local tradition, but in order to reach a distant, highly desirable goal: salvation. As a metaphor of man’s struggle to achieve redemption, the pilgrim’s progress is a comprehensive analysis of Protestant theology: as an account of a lengthy journey through what was in effect seventeenth-century, it vividly describes the obstacles, legal as well as topographical, which made every pedestrian journey a wearisome undertaking.

As long as those conditions persisted, as long as the average man or woman had to confront the indignities and complicates of traveling on foot, the metaphorical message of Bunyan’s work remained most important. But over the last century and a half, two developments have taken place: we have produced a new kind of road and a new metaphor, a vast network of smooth, efficient highways leading to every conceivable destination. At the same time we have largely ceased to believe in one universally accepted religious goal, usually identified with Christianity and the notion of spiritual redemption and of an afterlife. Heaven is no longer our destination. A third interpretation is taking shape: a multitude of roads, each with its own destination, obliges us to choose, to make decisions of our own; and the discourse of planning, of policy in the public realm, increasingly resorts to such road-associated phrases as crossroads, dead ends, avenues of agreement, gridlock, collision course, impasse, and bypass.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler….” Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” has implications transcending the individual experience. It tells us of the dilemma of living in a world where there is no longer the one right way, the royal road to happiness and success, a path to the Heavenly City. Whichever road we take ultimately leads us to the agonizing moment of private decision. As with Saul of Tarsus the road to Damascus may lie straight ahead, but it is only in the course of the journey that we discover our true destination.

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