WHY? . . . . WHY NOT?

People sometimes ask me, "Why do you travel?" I never know quite what to say. To travel seems as necessary to me as breathing or eating. It doesn't have to be a big trip. When we had no money in graduate school, I drove the eight hours from Chapel Hill, NC to my mom's house in Marietta, GA -- just me and my baby -- as often as I could. I'd pull over to nurse him as needed and munch on the crackers and apples I'd brought for myself. Just the memory of those trips evokes again the thrill of the road, of moving, the world whizzing by outside my window, ever new horizons just ahead.

I don't know what it is. I get excited thinking about what a wonderful world we live in, what amazing people populate the planet -- most of whom I'll never meet, never know, never understand as I'd like to. We can sink so quickly into our own narrow little world, a world of rigid belief systems and habitual patterns of living. Even those of us who think of ourselves as "enlightened" or "broad-minded" are just as stuck in our own myopic view of things (e.g. "I am so broad-minded.")

I travel to remind myself that what I think I know is not necessarily so. That there are other ways besides the American way, the Mormon way, the intellectual way, the middle-class way. There are other ways to live and contribute and be happy. I travel to shake myself up, to try to loosen up the inevitable rigidness in my own judgments of the world. To free myself to see.

My friend Tracey once said to me, "Lisa, you are an explorer. That's who you are, at heart. It's how you live your life, on all fronts, as an explorer." I'd never given that ineffable inner need a label, but I immediately recognized the aptness of it. It explains, perhaps, why this poetic snip by T. S. Eliot has sat on my desk for decades: "We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and know the place for the first time."

I expect I will come home to Camas from this Big Trip changed. For the better, I hope. But on a more mystic scale, I hope to arrive where I really began better than I left it. I have always felt like a traveler here, on a journey away from Home, a journey of exploration and discovery. It's a fascinating trip, and I'm trying to make the most of it. My objectives? Truth. Love.

No, you don't have to go 'round the world to find truth or love or adventure or beautiful, interesting people. But why not?