Should I Stay or Should I Go?
A case against travel.
“As far as wanting to go places, I can’t believe people do it for fun. When I’m in airports, and I see people going on vacations, I think, ‘How horrible could your life be? How bad is your regular life, that you think, you know what would be fun? Let’s get the kids, go to the airport, with thousands of pieces of luggage, stand in these lines, be yelled at by a bunch of morons, leave late, be squished all together — and this is better than our actual life.”
― Fran Lebowitz, Pretend It’s A City.
Pretend It’s A City has to be one of my favourite shows on Netflix. If you haven’t watched it, just do yourself a favour and watch the trailer.
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I recently renewed my New Yorker subscription and, as if in answer to prayer, the first article that caught my attention was The Case Against Travel. For some time now I’ve been toying with the idea of planning an overseas trip. I have not left the shores of South Africa since I returned from my postdoc in Sweden in March 2017, a few months before my son was born. That was 6 years ago.
Travel used to be something that was high up on my list of things that I considered to be part of a Meaningful and Interesting Life. It could have been an age and stage thing; having the flexibility, the disposable income that wasn’t allocated towards medical aid or school fees or new gutters, and let’s be honest, the energy. (This morning the petrol attendant warmly said, ‘Wow, you look tired’. I mean if that doesn’t make you feel good, what will?)
But since having kids my appetite for travel has greatly diminished. At first it was the anxiety around going anywhere – I didn’t leave our suburb pretty much for the first year of Kingsley’s life. And when we did finally muster up the courage to do a trip to the Transkei, he got sick and I got pregnant. My internal voice glibly chirping ‘I told you so’. The experience made my sense of adventure shrivel entirely.
Now a few years down the line, anxiety no longer the mainstay of my internal emotional map, I have been wondering if a Big Holiday should be on the cards. But the key word here is should.
The article I mentioned above wasn’t actually as good as I’d hoped it would be. It was very sanctimonious, but it did have a few lines that resonated with my current state of mind.
“Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people.”
Having spent the past seven years at home, traveling only to my family in Cape Town and the Drakensburg, and maybe an odd weekend here and there, I have discovered the pleasure of staying put. One might call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I call it Being at Peace.
“Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue,” writes Agnes Callard.
Why do we see, particularly foreign, travel as a major path to enlightenment, but consider its opposite, staying in one place, small-minded? Does it not take greater imagination and empathy ‘bloom where you are planted’?*
One of my greatest personal achievements these last few years has been learning how to delight in domestic life. The Covid Pandemic really was the catalyst for this. I am sorry if I’m sounding like a 1950s home economics textbook. I understand that it was a calamitous time for many; but what I am referring to is that the pandemic lockdowns took away the option of travel. And that forced us to consider life without that avenue of pleasure. Frankly, fewer options, less of the Push Application Culture, is what we all need.
The New Yorker piece asks us to,
“Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel… More and more of this, and then I die.”
So, what is your This?
The more settled I have become in my This, the more I have felt travel to be an external pressure to Keep up with the Jones’s. I don’t want people to think I’m boring, or poor (let’s just be honest here), or small-minded.
But sometimes I feel embarrassed to admit that I’m okay with eating Sri Lankan chicken from the restaurant in Rosebank Mall, and not flying half-way around the world to taste The Real Thing*.
In 2011 my sister and I did a three week trip to India, on the first night we were in a town popular with local pilgrims, chosen precisely because we wanted to find somewhere, and I quote the guidebook here, ‘untouched by the hands of colonialism’. We were completely overwhelmed and when we finally found somewhere to stay and a meal, we sobbed our eyes out saying that the food was better, “at the Indian-place-next-to-the-Woolies-on-Rondebosch-Main-Road”. We did go on to have a lovely time – but that is not the point of today’s column.*
The cost of flights (both financial, ecological, and emotional), visas, accommodation, seem very high when my house needs new windows and people at my door are asking for a litre of milk. (Look who is sounding sanctimonious now! ha!)
At its worst, travel seems to be capitalism’s turnkey solution: work so you can make money so you can travel so you can spend money and feel that this is really what life is about and work is unsatisfying but to have a more satisfying existence you need more travel so you need more money so you need more work.
And as I am exhausted just by typing that sentence, I must agree with Fran Lebowitz, ‘How horrible could your life be?’
I think I’ll just stay home.
…
*When we moved into our home I found a rock hidden in a forgotten garden bed that was naively painted with this phrase. I took that as a prophecy for creating a beautiful family life here in in “The fractured, shifting city of Johannesburg.”.
*Beware the ideology of Authenticity, it is a short step away from Exclusion.
*Today’s column is a honey roast of my change resistant ways, as our household is still going through our big school adjustment phase. Take it with a pinch of salt. I’m quite sure I’ll have a post in the future about the merits of the Life of Adventure. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”, thank you Walt Whitman.