Tourism & Home 2

I have to comment in the interwoven ironies in the last post.

The Tourist is characterised by the journey to distant lands, but essentially with the return home in mind. Why else do we travel with camera if we are not going to come home and show people our pictures.

It is a dialectical venture then - journey away but with home in mind especially when we pick up the camera to record what we see for home.

I think I battled against this. I always wanted to travel without a camera. I wanted to forget everything I saw because I never wanted it to be experienced in relation to home. If I was travelling then travelling was what i was going to do, and that means not being at home. To experience not being at home we need to forget about recording things for home. That means no pictures and no thought "wait till I tell people at home". Then we can really travel, actually take our minds with us.

Walking now I remember was a final underline to this principal. If you are going away from home you are going to have to work for it. Walk every step. In retrospect my Lands End - John o'Groats walk was very dialectically linked to home because I marvelled a lot on the way about at how far from home I had walked.

However if we forget where home is we equally forget that we are far away from home, and so travel becomes impossible. The experience at the end of this length of Britain walk was more akin to this - that i had forgotten i was away from home, walking had become my home and so there was no achievement in completing the walk, each day was just another day.

This links very much with life, purpose and goals. By setting a goal or destination away from "home" and working toward it we provide a position on the map of life. We can then plot journeys using this "home". Our life can take shape, we can tell stories about it, mark our successes and failures. Of interest is that such mapping is created by ourselves and that we could up all references and walk a day at a time, taking in what life offers us and never being in a position to think - I have progressed, I have fallen back, life was a success and life was a failure.

It is unusual to meet people who went nowhere for holidays, or did nothing with their lives. The ability to say that I went away from this place for Summer, or that I have done something and now am home is a great plus, it makes us interesting. But isn't their a superficiality here that even the person who can't tell amazing stories of life has still lived? That maybe they carried their home with them so that they never could return home to tell such stories.

Are both possibilities available and are they equally valid? Is it really meaningful to travel away from home, when the being "away" is only possible from the perspective of being at "home", that there is no real being away from anywhere. The wandering monks of India question Alexander the Great to this effect saying "how odd it is that you conquer so many lands when the only land every man owns is that on which he stands".