Leave the great indoorsnotes on the journey

A friend recently posted this Paulo Coelho quote on Facebook:

Trust and start walking. We are not alone in the dark, our path will unfold as we move. R.L.Stevenson once said: “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” If you can’t move in the physical world, move in your imagination, but MOVE.

A lovely sentiment, but as someone who is preparing to move countries in less than two weeks, the reality is quite different.  A recent New York Times article entitled The Psychology of Moving summed it up pretty well:

Whether one moves frequently or almost never, moving is an intensely emotional experience. The underlying psychological issues involved in real estate decisions are of great interest to therapists and psychologists, because housing and moving are filled with symbolism, the hope for new beginnings, crushing disappointments, loss, anxiety and fear.

“Panic can really set in around your home and your apartment,” said Ronnie Greenberg, a Manhattan psychoanalyst. “It’s a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it — they mainly talk about the packing and the external part of moving.”

That’s certainly not as sexy as the first statement, but it is most certainly closer to the truth (except for the part about not realizing how stressful it is.  I have pretty good grasp of how stressed I am right now!).

To go a little further (and definitely more eloquently) into the realities of moving, I want to go back to a great book everyone should read, The Art of Travel.  Alain De Botton says the following:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival.

Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.

At the heart of what makes moving such a complex emotional and physical endeavor is what Alain calls “the relationship between the anticipation of travel and its reality.”   It is never what you think it’s going to be, and that results in a lot of stress and mixed emotions.

The problem is that we can never fully anticipate all the mundane details involved in moving.  So we focus on the outcome — the first breakfast in your new home, the first family walk.  But oh, how the reality of the journey hurts.  One more quote from The Art of Travel that sums this up much better than I can:

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back out at the field. It continues to rain. At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window.

And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘He journeyed through the afternoon’.

So, there’s that.  But I guess the point is that, somehow, you get through it.  You journey through the afternoon, and you get where you need to be.  And after the dust settles you are left with the sense of accomplishment that comes from beating down a challenge — and a new beginning to make.

So even though I know the reality of getting there is going to be pretty bad, I need to keep my eyes on that first breakfast in Cape Town.  And that, I guess, is the art of moving.