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.

I took a lot of photos of course, and you can click here to view the album of what I think are the best ones.  But I also wanted to post some of my favorites here, and explain a little bit why I like these photos.

We’ll start in Cambria, one of my new favorite places in the U.S.  It’s a little coastal gem of a town tucked away off the main highway.  It reminds me a lot of Kleinmond – the South African town where I spent my summers growing up – which might explain why I love it so much.  There’s a beautiful walkway along the ocean, where I took these photos:

We went for a walk along the beach the next morning, and I got some shots I really like.  The black sand with the white tree-stumps create a really nice effect:

We then went to Hearst Castle, where I took way too many pictures, but this one is probably my favorite:

The next morning we took off for L.A., but first we made stop in the town of Harmony, just off Highway 1.  It is one of the smallest towns in America (population 18), and it is any photographer’s dream! The place has so much character, and I spent quite a bit of time there while my family shopped around for pottery and glass works.  These are my favorite shots:

Our next stop was L.A., but I have to say that it’s probably my least favorite city in the world, so getting pictures I like there was nearly impossible.  I think you have to like a place and feel moved to try to capture its “sense of place,” as my dad calls it.  Otherwise you just end up with generic city shots of billboards and tall buildings.   So there it is – great trip, and lots of fun playing around with my camera!

First, I want to say that there lives a unique dichotomy within those of us who were born and raised in South Africa.  Look, we get it.  We get that the crime rate is astronomical, the politics are corrupt, and things just tend to not work the way it “should” according to First World standards.  Yes, we get all that, but still we can’t emancipate ourselves from this flawed, breathtakingly beautiful country – and its open-hearted, ready-to-take-on-the-future people.  And then I read paragraphs like this one in the Newsweek article, and I just shake my head – not because the facts are wrong, but because it misses the point so completely:

The primary driver for emigration among all groups, but especially whites, who still retain the majority of South Africa’s wealth, is fear of crime. With more than 50 killings a day, South Africa has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. The same goes for rape—ranking the country alongside conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Colombia and Afghanistan. Future Fact polling indicates that more than 95 percent of those eager to leave South Africa rate violent crime as the single most important factor affecting their thinking.

Yes, it sounds scary – and the facts are disturbing.  But I’ve also recently seen a remarkable uprising of positivity in South Africa that I haven’t seen before.  I’m increasingly seeing a “good riddance” attitude towards those who leave the country loudly and for negative reasons.  A hope that all the complainers would leave already, so that those who would like to stay and build can get down to business without the distracting and annoying voices of the nay-sayers.  I still remember a high school teacher who once asked me, “Do you want to ride the wave of a place that has already accomplished everything, or be a part of building something that has huge unmet potential?”  I choose the latter.

I know what you’re thinking though – how can I be judgmental about this while I sit “safely” in another country.  Sure, point taken.  But I can say that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the crime rate or the politcal environment (Yep, I left to pursue a girl…).  And I can also say that we will move back, we will definitely move back, and that I’m using my time here to develop skills I can use to help build the future of South Africa.

Why do we plan to go back?  Because there’s no place like Africa.  Chaos and beauty exist so close to each other, often within the same place and the same moment, and it creates an energy that you just cannot describe.  Yes, it’s not for the faint-hearted, and the decision to live there, especially if you’ve lived somewhere else in the world for a while, is made for reasons that transcend the traditional Western values of consumerism and security.

You live in Africa because you can’t get it out of your blood.  You live there because you are placed there to make a difference.  You live there because you are compelled by the red earth and the redder sunsets to make a small contribution to the ongoing effort to save it from itself, to preserve both the chaos and the beauty so that it can co-exist in harmony.  And you do it not for yourself, but for your children, and for generations to come.  You live there because you believe that Africa is not the dark continent it is made out to be, that it cannot be written off, that it is too precious and too fragile and too robust, that the world is making a big mistake if it thinks African countries cannot be successful, peaceful democracies.

And so I’ve had several conversations with my country over the past few years.  We’re still fighting with each other, my country and I, not quite coming to an agreement about my future there.  But I’m ok with that for now.  Because I know Africa will never retreat, never stop talking, never condemn me for taking so long to come back.  Make no mistake — I know that Africa does not need me.  But I need it, desperately.  I need it to blow life into my calloused bones.  And I need it because I was born there.  I am an African.

And that is why I will return.

We were in for a huge surprise on the first night.  We were just walking around, and stumbled on Radio City Music Hall – it’s a world famous venue for live music and a place where I’ve always wanted to see a show.  Well, Death Cab For Cutie was playing that night, and while I was taking photos of the outside building, a couple came up to us offering up free tickets to the show.  She is pregnant and didn’t want to deal with the loud music.  Thank you very much!!  It was a fantastic show, and turned me into a full-blown, totally obsessed fan of Death Cab…

We spent the next few days being tourists, going to all the sites.  Here are some highlights:

Done with sightseeing, we went about the business of doing fun things and generally being dorks…  First, up, SPAMALOT!  Followed by a stop at the Today Show…

And of course, you can always count on Jess…

For the full picture gallery, you can go to http://rianvdm.smugmug.com/gallery/6217539_VSQpT