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From Ryan Holiday, "This is Always Worth All The Trouble (Or so I tell myself)

 

​This Is Always Worth All The Trouble (Or So I Tell Myself)​ There are a million good reasons not to travel. I woke up with a bunch of them this morning. I was exhausted. My kids were fighting. My wife has been sick. It was ungodly hot—literally the hottest Europe has ever been. My routine is out the window. So is any sense of a budget. Our suitcases are already full of knick-nacks and crap we don’t need and there’s quite a bit of trip left. The car that was supposed to pick us up for our tour is late. But we’re in Rome. It’s all worth it…or so I tell myself. Even though travel can be expensive, stressful, and frustrating. Even though it tests your patience. Even though things go wrong. Even though you know that when you get home, you’ll be behind on everything. Still, it’s worth it. It has always been worth it. For all their warnings against escapism, the Stoics traveled widely—in an age when travel was far slower, harder, and more dangerous. Unlike his stepfather Antoninus, who never left Italy, Marcus Aurelius was on the road a lot as emperor. It wasn’t always pleasant. But it undoubtedly influenced his philosophy and his view of the world. He could have sent someone else to inspect the troops on his behalf, but he chose to go. When the calls of duty and the road converged, he went. Seneca was born in Corduba, Spain (modern Córdoba), moved to Rome, and in addition to his exile in Corsica, lived for nearly a decade in Egypt. Posidonius (a key figure in Middle Stoicism) worked and lived in many places throughout his long life—Syria, Athens, Rome, and Rhodes—and traveled almost the entirety of the known world. After completing his studies under Posidonius, Athenodorus traveled widely as a lecturer, reaching Petra, Egypt, and other major Mediterranean cities before becoming young Octavian’s teacher in Apollonia, on the coast of modern Albania. These were critical experiences for them. Then, and now, hitting the road was a source of wisdom. It shaped their philosophy. It enlarged their view of the world. It opened their eyes to new lands, new customs, new perspectives. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” Mark Twain famously wrote, “and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” This was true of America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it was true in Rome in the first century. Marcus Aurelius’ passages in Meditations which reference being a citizen of the world were almost certainly shaped by the people he met in Athens and Tarsus and Alexandria (and of course the people he met in Rome who had traveled there from far away). Every culture thinks its norms are, well, normal. One of my favorite examples of this is the criticism I get that by talking about politics I am “upsetting half my audience.” It’s the most American thing in the world to assume that the world is as evenly divided as America is. (Shocker, it’s not!) Only travel can shake us from this ethnocentrism, awakening us to the plain fact that our way of life is but one of many. In our travels, we meet people who care about different things, wear different clothes, tell different stories, eat different foods, speak different languages. When he traveled, Montaigne sucked up everything he saw like a vacuum, avoiding much in the way of plans, leaving himself open to chance encounters and experiences. Like the time he came across men leading two ostriches on leashes as a present for a duke. He stopped in at every church he could find, taking in their various practices like an anthropologist. When the New World was discovered—basically in his lifetime—Montaigne did not think the people who lived there were savages. From his travels, he understood that every distant land has its own culture and beliefs—and that our customs would seem just as barbaric to them. Not that he defended the “horrible barbarity” of cannibalism. What struck him was that “while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own.” Did the cannibals draw and quarter each other? Commit atrocities? Accuse each other of black magic? Who was actually the barbarian? Perhaps it was a lesson he first absorbed from his extensive reading of Herodotus, our first great historian and travel writer, who traveled thousands over the course of his life—from Persia to Athens to Italy, Libya, Babylonia, Byzantium, and the Black Sea. Above all, he delighted in getting inside the nomos of each place—the people’s customs, and the ways they differed from his own. He loved to tell the story about a small sect in India that ate a small piece of their dead as part of a religious ritual. Obscene! Disgusting! But how did these people react when told that Greeks burned their dead at the funeral pyre? An outrage! A sacrilege! Me and Herodotus in the Palazzo Massimo The world is very big. The place you call home is only one small corner of it. There is wisdom on the other side of the hill, wisdom in the experiences that only the road can give you, wisdom in learning how other people live and why they live that way. It’s easy to be comfortable where you are. To tell yourself that travel isn’t worth all the hassle. To think of it as a luxury, an indulgence, a needless extravagance. But it isn’t. It’s essential. “I was never a fan of people who don’t leave home,” the well-traveled Joan Didion once wrote. “It just seems like part of your duty in life.” But leaving home doesn’t have to mean going far. It doesn’t have to mean spending lots of money on some exotic trip to the other side of the world. I remember talking to a waitress in Natchez, Mississippi once who told me she had never been to Vicksburg (a little over an hour away!). Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, I was lucky my parents took us on trips to Europe and China and Canada and Mexico, but I BARELY ever went to downtown Sacramento. Or even San Francisco. I only discovered the fullness of those cities as an adult. Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it later. When you’re older. When the kids are older. When things settle down. When you have more money. When it’s more convenient. That misses the point. You don’t need the benefits of travel someday, when your life is perfectly arranged for it. You need them now. So hit the road! Travel to the well-known places and the little seen. Travel by boat and by car and by train and by plane and by foot. Read the signs. Struggle with the language barrier. See things from the other side of the road. Eat the food. Go to the museums. Sit at sidewalk cafes. See the ancient hieroglyphs and notice graffiti on city streets. See the cemeteries. Visit the battlefields. Listen to people chatter. Learn. Explore. Be curious. Ask questions. Carry a notebook. Write down everything you see and feel and think. See your own country as a tourist. Live abroad like a local. Every building, every person has a story. Think of what they witnessed. Think of who stood where you are standing. Think of what was here before any of this was here. Think of what people used to think here, what they were afraid of, what they hoped for, what they believed. Let things go wrong (and they will!). These experiences teach as much as anything else. Last summer, I spent 27 days in Greece with my family, covering some 3,000 kilometers between Athens, Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Thermopylae, Mount Olympus, Marathon, and Cape Sounio. We were in a Chinese rental car that was far too big for tiny ancient streets. We got a flat tire at the top of Mount Olympus. I was stung by a jellyfish near Thermopylae. We bumped into friends I hadn’t seen since high school. We got ripped off. On the last day, a bee stung me in the back of the throat and I almost died. Oh, and somewhere in between there, I got myself a bad case of sunstroke. But that’s what travel is supposed to be. Travel is an adventure. Travel is pushing your limits. Travel is trying new things. Travel is learning that most problems can be solved, most setbacks can be survived, and most of what goes wrong can be figured out. You don’t have to be gone for long. You don’t have to spend a fortune. You don’t have to see the whole world to become a worldly person. But you have to check out what’s on the other side of the hill a couple times. You have to expose yourself to different places, different people, different perspectives. You have to hit the road. It will be disruptive. Your patience will be tested. Things will go wrong. And it will all be worth it.

Early Spring

 

Today, by Mary Oliver

 

Look and see!

 

It can be an ugly world. It can be a boring world. It can be a world full of distraction. Which is why the artist and the philosopher must learn how to cultivate their eyes. In 1940, the writer James Baldwin was walking in New York City with the painter Beauford Delaney, his friend and mentor. As they crossed the street, Delaney stopped the young Baldwin. “Look,” he said, as he pointed down into the gutter. “What do you see?” All Baldwin saw was a puddle. Delaney told him to look again. This time Baldwin saw, as Nicholas Boggs recounts in Baldwin: A Love Story, “a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter’s black water, distorted and radiant.” It is clear in Meditations that someone did this for Marcus Aurelius. How else can you explain his beautiful observations of seemingly ordinary or even unpleasant things—from the way an olive rots on the ground or the foam flecked on a boar’s mouth? What else could explain not just his turns of phrase but his ability to find philosophical truths in his own struggles as a human being? Perhaps it was Rusticus, his philosophy teacher, who taught him this, or Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, or some poet or writer he met, but in any case, as Baldwin said of Delaney, “The reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.” And so it goes for us. We must cultivate the ability to see—to see beauty and poetry everywhere—because it is everywhere. We must look into the gutter. We must change our aperture and perspective so that amidst the muddle and puddles of life, we can see what the artist and the philosopher sees. Reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations can change the way you see the world