A BABY SHOULD cry at birth. It must be traumatic being born, after all. The compressing comfort of the womb is suddenly gone, the noises and lights once gleaned through the mother’s body now rush in unfiltered.

The first journey the former foetus goes upon is a watery slide. And then its umbilical cord is cut. No more automatic feed. Trauma indeed.

Then follows the shock of countless new impressions from a boundlessly extended world outside the mother. No wonder babies have to sleep all the time. It is good trauma therapy, and a perfect getaway.

It then grows into the world, learning to articulate its own body, and to manage the world—first through cries, then yells, and perhaps tantrums, and then through words. All the while, if it is lucky, its ignorance of the world is compensated for by loving adults. It can learn at its own pace as it travels through its young life, through time and space, exponentially decreasing its witlessness in the world, and its incapacity to survive on its own.

This learning process I would like to equate with “Travel”. If you think about it, for a child to move from the comfort of home to the local shopping mall is really quite an adventure. It has to survive a barrage of signals, contacts and pointless noises. It has to learn to crawl, walk, run and climb, in order to get to places. It has to test all sorts of food and drinks, and form opinions about them that it has to communicate to its surroundings. Above all, it has to communicate. It has to learn to understand words and speak words. It has to learn to know its surroundings’ preferred ways of expression and behaviour.

That is quite a journey. An odyssey, no less. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. And that is only for starters. No easy thing being a child.

So, you cannot blame a child for thinking up ways to travel more slowly, to pick its own paths to travel, or to avoid destinations and situations it does not feel contented with. All these choices, in the end, will collectively build the child’s character, and decide its psychological wellbeing.

Have you noticed how happy a child becomes when it first learns how to walk? And how shocked and pleased that it can actually pull it off? Travel begins there. Learning is a physical accomplishment, to start with. Physical skills are then followed by social skills. Getting what you want, even before words, requires interaction with other beings. And this boosts our willingness to learn and our agency.

Language As High-Speed Rail

For all of us, language is the vehicle on which we travel the fastest—into life, into society and into the world. It is the high-speed rail of our trip through life. But more than just a social tool, the language we learn to read in opens up destinations beyond imagination. Children’s books are a great blessing here. Then there are comics, cartoons and all the things we can access because we have learned to read. Nowadays, children have computer games to overwhelm them with imagined worlds.

At some point, the risk is high that the child—or young person—decides that he has learned enough. He does not have to respond to every new impulse. He can decide what they are within his developed worldview. He learns that he can sort and simplify them with his words, and make them predictable things with ready descriptions. That is when the young person decides to stop travelling. Lifelong learning stops because he thinks he has learned enough to get by. He now has a philosophy, an ideology, a religion.

Both the young and adults, however, can reach a point when they decide that they now know enough. They understand the world, no new thing can and should surprise them because they do have an explanation for it, and they can place it within their ready ideological tapestry. Travel as an epistemological journey can actually stop in order to diminish the painful experience of always not knowing enough, of the world hitting you with unknowns. Curiosity has its price. It is not only cats that pay with their lives for being curious.

Traveller and/or Tourist

Therein lies the point of my somewhat belaboured introduction to tie travel to the search for knowledge that defines everyone’s life. We are able to stop being curious, isn’t that a curious observation? To keep to my line of thinking, isn’t that where we actually differentiate the Traveller from the Tourist whenever we wish to malign a certain attitude we observe in a certain type of superficial traveller? The tourist is no longer suffering from curiosity. He is no longer even an observer. He sightsees, he nods his self-satisfied head, he snaps a shot to remind himself of what he cannot properly absorb, consider or remember in front of him.

In truth, there is a price to be paid for learning, for travelling. Your worldview takes knocks if you remain curious and realise that all you know is tentative.

As with the moment of birth, travel trauma remains possible throughout your life. Travelling to a situation that challenges your physical, social and intellectual habits can be exciting, but an excruciating overdose is always possible. The point where you feel flabbergasted differs between individuals, no doubt, but none of us can really adapt to everything imaginable.

At this juncture, we see why it is useful to equate travel with learning. Travel with life, in fact. Life, travel and learning are all agonising matters.

Personally, I have found it easy to sympathise with certain autistic persons. Deciding that the world is too full of impulses to handle is a totally rational position to take. In fact, one could argue that as we develop our intellectual capacity and work out ideas for ourselves, all of us seek to reach a point where we now know enough. We wish to slow down our travelling and learning, slow down the situation of being challenged.

For most of us, learning is conceptually and experientially tied to being in school. And when schooling stops, learning also stops, in a sense. We bond strongly with school chums, and we wish for each to stay the same since they also define us and help orientate us as we move into professional life.

After school or university life, we are usually tied to a career where learning is a guided tour within which we learn a job, we learn “best practices” and we climb a given ladder. We get through life, we go through the business of living, we travel less and less, we get less and less curious, we become “practical”. No time for much else. Life has taken over. We are married, the kids get in the way.

But are we not selling ourselves short? Has life taken over, or has life been taken over? Have we stopped being a traveller, and instead, accepted life as a tourist on a guided tour? Or are we just thinking wrongly about the matter of travel and learning? Are the two phenomena perhaps much more connected than we think?

Is travelling not as much like registering for a personally challenging course—sewing, ceramics, yoga—as it is like picking a destination for the holidays?

But even tourism is evolving as a concept. Too much sightseeing tourism, already made irrelevant by Instagram, has led us to consider “experiential tourism”. This is not so much about learning something as to be immersed in something. To take time with something, to step out of our daily life into something significantly different. Such an aspiration is something quite different from sightseeing tourism, and is probably a search for more meaning in the act of travelling. It is closer to using travel as learning.

Wondering About Wanderlust

Most relevant to our discussion is a word that is seldom used nowadays—wanderlust. As a term, it is self-explanatory enough, but having this longing is often a mixed blessing.

“Lust” is easy enough to understand. It is this desire that is almost uncontrollable, which we tend to have for certain things, most notably in a sexual context. What is problematic is that we tend to mistake it for other emotions, like love. So as not to make the feeling too complex, let us think of it as something more physical, like hunger or thirst. The need is clear, the pain is undeniable.

“Wander” is to roam, to travel, to ramble, to amble. To not want to be where one is, in short. There is traditionally, therefore, a sense that someone with wanderlust is not reliable because he might not be around the next day. Also, he cannot commit, and therefore he is often unable to go into depth on any issue. There is a touch of wonderment, of being without clear ambitions, attached to the term.

One can see how those—mainstream society, to be sure—who are less mobile, less inclined to travel, would not trust a person “suffering” from wanderlust. But is that judgment not partially a reflection of their own lack (or fear) of freedom, of a sense of adventure? I am sure the world is full of people who appear to exhibit wanderlust because they are merely running away from something, from some weakness in themselves. At the same time, there are those whose wanderlust is an epistemic need to see more, hear more, experience more.

In a way, I am trying not only to equate the wish to learn with the wish to travel, but also the lust to learn with the lust to wander.

Emotional Journeys

Our journeys are, however, never just about learning. Our epistemic needs are never without emotional longings. We have nostalgia for places—for example, for historical places. Human history is always a fountain that promises self-knowledge. The past speaks to and of the present. Observing history, either in a book or on one’s travels, lands us outside our own times, humbles us and offers us spans of time that diminish our insistent egos.

Travel reminds us of possibilities in life we did not use, people we almost met, love affairs we could have had. Imaginings discarded or have had to erase. All that is on a personal level.

Travel also presents us with lives lived by other humans in other places in other times. These, we find to be exciting. We can empathise. Personally, I get ecstatic wherever nature and culture have intertwined. An old staircase in the deep forest of Penang Hill, old cypress trees planted centuries ago standing forgotten on an otherwise natural gravelly slope in Sicily, Yuan Dynasty statues in a modern park in Beijing, giant trees perched on temple ruins in Cambodia, caves in Cornwall dug centuries ago for tin-mining… Reminders that the world existed before me, and will exist after me. And that many worlds exist now alongside me in my time, of which I can have little knowledge. As I said, travel is learning… but mainly learning to be humble.

Where modern knowledge is concerned, travel as learning is more about the humanities than anything else. These are the forgotten subjects in the world of technological innovations, and they deal with knowledge whose relevance is necessarily more subjective, more contextual and more immediate. More in the realm of poetry and the search for profound expressions of the human experience.

History, philosophy, literature… These subjects are so central to the human experience that they should not even be considered subjects. They are the basis for human knowledge, fodder for the traveller.

Losses and Recoveries

The novelty in inspiration and facts that are the profits of travel are also often accompanied by reminders of loss, if one is old enough. Of things forgotten. Of things whose importance got overshadowed by the business of life. But we do perceive the lost significance of these things once we are made cognisant of them again. Painful, but in a sweet way. Losses remembered are halfway to being recovered.

This brings the discussion to the issue of migration. Who is a migrant? Is he a traveller, and of what kind? What condition of life is it to not live where one was born and raised? We tend to think of travellers as people who are settled somewhere, and who then take a trip—long or short—somewhere else. But then there are those who are serial migrants, who settle in a number of places over time, maybe to return home sometime in their lives, maybe not.

Then, there are the group migrants, people who move as matter of course. Today, we call these diasporic, and as something worth noting for being atypical and anomalous. This notion is worth questioning in many cases. For example, the Nusantara had always been a traveller’s paradise. You got on a boat and you had countless islands waiting for you to explore, to hide among, to exploit. This has been a region of migrants, of people on the move. Landlubbers paled in comparison to seafarers here. Things have changed though.

The nation state with its jealous borders have arrived, corralling people in their pens. As a project, nation states are defensive by nature. They create citizens that are defensive by nature. Fearing the world, they fear to travel. Fearing to travel, they fail to learn. Failing to learn, they prefer to stay where they are, in mind and body. Staying where they are, they have to deny their past. Bad cycle.

Sheepishly, travellers are now the exception, and settlers the norm. Just as schooling makes us think that learning is a process that takes place in school and not a lifelong joy, the nation state makes us think that travelling is a state-sanctioned privilege and not a human right. A human need, in fact.

Be that as it may, travel as lifelong learning and learning as endless travel is something an individual can decide to pursue.

In the end, what should interest us is the meaningfulness of the life of an individual. Is meaning for him found “out there”, or is it something he finds through a sense of cultivated agency, a sense of conscious detachment, a sense of being a curious traveller?

Travelling is a very active undertaking. You invest greatly in it. Like life itself, it requires resources, planning, uprooting of relationships. It puts things on hold, and conjures new trajectories. Like the process of learning.

We have all experienced how, more often than not, learning something substantial changes the trajectory of our life, alters our ambitions, shifts our self-image. Life is a journey; an adventure we cannot avoid. Travel is life. And travelling is learning.