"Why We Travel" with kids
How Pico Iyer has stayed with me. Revisiting an old essay through the eyes of a parent.
New to Carry On? Check out the archive where I disclose the Back Story behind this project and My Hypothesis in starting it.
Back to the beginning
The first time I read the essay Why We Travel, by Pico Iyer from 2000, it was freshman fall at NYU and I had chosen an interdisciplinary seminar titled “Travel Narratives” to kick off my college experience. Over the course of the semester, the class readings took a small cohort of teenagers who had just moved to the intellectual metropolis of New York City and exposed us to the world of nonfiction travel literature.
An unbridled sense of possibility pulsated from wall to wall of that intimate classroom. It felt as if everywhere we read about and everything we discussed was within the reach of our bright futures.
While other students were preoccupied with early prerequisite courses, I was privy to this class because I had intentionally chosen to attend NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where, yes, you *make your own major*. I say that Gallatin is a place for people who know what they want to learn but don’t yet know what they want to do.
In the time since I took “Travel Narratives”, I have traveled for my studies (a semester in Buenos Aires, a summer in Paris), for my work (market appointments in Milan, hosting product seminars in virtually every mall in America), for leisure (desert camping in Jordan, a road trip from Denmark to Germany, etc) and, most recently, I’ve traveled around the country with my daughter.
Even so, the me that read Why We Travel 13 years ago might be surprised that future her is not living in Europe working for a major fashion house and speaking a few extra languages with native proficiency while exclusively driving a Vespa right now.
She may not understand how those things she wanted to learn have culminated into this specific form of doing.
Although, she will eventually realize that even those who “knew” what they wanted to do as an 18-year-old have since changed course, in one way or another.
Priorities change, I would tell that college freshman, knowing at my core that it wouldn’t yet land with her.
New parents, their world actively shifting on its axis and morphing into something that necessitates the tangible changing of priorities, are of the few who can appropriately grasp the meaning of these words.
Lost and Found
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”
Why We Travel opens with this.
In reading the essay again as a college graduate, a professional, and a mother, I find a new relationship with the influencing words of my youth. This line about travel could easily be said of bringing a human being into the world.
Initially, we very much lose ourselves. Maybe we even chose to become parents because we are ready to tip-toe shyly away from the person we were, using the months of pregnancy and early parenthood to morph into the new person we’d like to be. Possibly, we don’t intend to lose ourselves. Even swear to friends that we will not be different and that a baby will fit seamlessly into our existing lives. Yet the demands of early parenting alter the reality we always knew, distorting days into three-hour stretches with feed, diaper, play, sleep, clean, repeat the only truth we recognize for some time.
But oh, do we find ourselves! We turn into spokespeople for the wordless beings we’ve created. We find that taking a few months to do something outside of working a corporate job can actually be worth our time - if even more challenging than the job we thought was hard. We find ourselves stronger. We find ourselves in our children through paths we never expected; ones that can feel threatening and bring us to the core of who we are.
Pico Iyer speaks specifically to the connection between the word “travel” and “travail”; that travel is work and that it is so satisfying particularly because it can be uncomfortable and difficult.
“Never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them.” Never more, maybe, than a new parent who, after months of colic or reflux or sleep issues or the witching hour or a combination thereof, experiences their baby laugh for the first time.
He’s right about this: the travails create the blessings.
The tourist and the traveler
“Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.”
The first time I read this, I did so while quietly patting myself on the back.
Of course I am of the traveler variety and not a simple tourist. At the time, Iyer’s point about leaving assumptions at home altogether eluded the young version of me. I for one was quite satisfied with comparing the places I’d been to one another, a subliminal message that I had traveled enough to have places to compare everywhere to.
Now as a parent, I see the effects of one’s ability, or inability, to leave assumptions at home. Not only in raising an infant (in my case, with a premature birth, all assumptions went straight out the window), but also in traveling with one.
When on the road with my daughter, I am amazed by how the hours of structure-building we do at home, whether intentionally setting a schedule or because daily routine inevitably dictates similar meal and nap times, are casually disregarded.
In the echo chamber of an airplane, for one, snacks flow freely and screen time is unlimited in service of minimizing baby noisemaking that is perfectly appropriate in our own front yard.
As many parents know or will find out, bringing assumptions with you on travels with children is the definition of a losing battle. It’s a way to set yourself up for disappointment, just as would be comparing Cairo and Cuzco.
“The first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.”
In other words, the assumptions we build as parents are in fact subject to change based on our environments. To be honest, I’ve found this to be a relief. People like to say that babies are adaptable, and surely they can be, but what about adults?
Traveling with our kids not only compels our children to adapt but also pressures us as parents to get out of our own heads and to leave behind the boxes we believe we must check in our day-to-day lives; it refocuses our attention on the moment in front of us.
The great promise
“The great promise of [the freedom of travel] is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self.”
Iyer goes on to speak about the ways in which traveling forces us into the moment and can even change our perception of time. When we attempt to speak a foreign language, he says, we’re focused on being understood, not perfectly communicating our thoughts. In fact, every day when my daughter tries to say new words she is experiencing a similar undertaking.
I believe we are able to return to “a more open kind of self” because, while traveling, we have to. No matter how high-strung of a person you are (and I very much am), traveling with kids is an extremely effective forcing function for letting go.
Dealing with the situations I’ve encountered while traveling with my daughter have been a much needed foil to my catastrophic-thinking brain. For example -
Standing at the gate as boarding begins, entertaining an 11-month-old who wants to crawl on the dirty floor while my husband races through the airport trying to make the flight after extreme traffic around LAX, I sunk into a level of calmness I didn’t know was possible. What can we do but wait for him? Or -
Arriving at Richmond International Airport and, after an hour of waiting, finding that Allegiant Airlines lost both our car seat and pack & play, I was singularly focused on my baby and keeping her fed and happy and napped. These travails were not fun, they complicated things quite a bit, but as long as my daughter was okay the frustrations became manageable.
This is why I need to travel. To access the more open kind of self that lives beneath my exterior as a parent and a person. And, to prove to myself again and again that I am capable of handling what comes my way.
This proof in turn leads to a stronger sense of openness to the world; an ability to harness a sense of freedom which can not exist without facing the unknown.
Ideal travel
“The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, ‘should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.’ And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.”
I first traveled outside the country when I was eight years old. I first took my daughter on a flight when she was four months old. I can confirm that the thing I’m searching for in traveling is something that I’ve never quite found. And I can agree that searching for it continues to be the best kind of story in my life.
On the internet I came across the NYU Gallatin Bulletin from the 2010-2011 academic year and I realized it has a section that highlights the “Travel Narratives” interdisciplinary seminar I took:
“Through their encounters with these books, students have the opportunity to examine the cultural legacy that has shaped us as individuals and as a society… and to discover the pleasures and challenges of the pursuit of knowledge”
The pleasures and challenges of the pursuit of knowledge. Blessings that stem from hardships. The thrill of being in a new place with your child after an arduous flight. No matter how you slice it, parenting and traveling and doing both at the same time are worthwhile because of, not simply in spite of, the obstacles we encounter.
In researching this piece I remembered that my class had a communal blog for “Travel Narratives” and that we were required to respond to each reading in blog post form; a teaching method quite ahead of its time for 2010 if you ask me.
When I searched for the blog, the landing page reads that the site has been “retired”. At first I was disappointed; how interesting would it be if I could compare my reading of Why We Travel today to how I reacted to the essay 13 years ago?
But soon after, I realized it felt right. The view of the world I had when reading travel stories for the first time has been retired, too.
So well said! It’s always been hard for me to sum up why it is that I enjoy travel so much but I think you’ve expressed it right here. Thanks for another great read.