I’ve just wrapped a week-long sojourn in the Atlantic — a cruise out of Miami that made port in both the Dominican Republic and Bahamas. The trip was carefully organized, insular, and care-free.
We drove buggies through the Dominican jungles and steered golf carts to scout out seafood across Bimini Island. On the ship, the cuisine was excellent and the sun turned my skin golden. The Caribbean breeze contrasted sharply from New York’s wintry commotion.
A week without a laptop and with shoddy phone service gave me a chance to reestablish the boundaries between personal and professional that have increasingly blurred over recent months.
The trip was a new, upbeat experience, and I’m glad it happened. I used to travel more often when I lived in Hong Kong (here’s my memoir of my time in Southeast Asia), and the cruise reminded me of the questions I used to contemplate overseas.
Some people travel to escape troubles they face at home. Or they see it as a chance to become someone else. The absent parent who uses travel to become the doting caretaker once again. The shy introvert who transforms into the life of a party only in front of strangers.
For me, as far as I can tell, I’m satisfied with my work and relationships at home, so the chance to get away for a spell instead offered me a moment to become no one in particular.
One of my favorite 20th century authors, W. Somerset Maugham, said that a person’s successes could cripple them as much as failures could. And as a playwright and novelist, his entire livelihood was based on his ability to sway public opinion in his favor — to capture the minds’ of others using his stories.
In a similar way, as a journalist, my whole life is readily on display. Nearly everything I produce is public. My career is available for the scrutiny of any eye. While I wouldn’t pretend to occupy anything close to fame, the public nature of my profession makes temporary anonymity attractive.
Instead of explaining the news to millions of readers, I remained an anonymous, quiet bystander for several days. A listener and observer, rather than a speaker or writer. An audience member who could ignore events as they unfolded, rather than one responsible for chronicling them.
Like Maugham, I have no plans of slowing down my travels, work notwithstanding. Standing in unfamiliar locales, Maugham wrote, is what kept him young and awake.
Travel, he said, is what gave him the chance to learn what he couldn’t while among his peers.
‘‘I was ever looking forward, generally to something I proposed to do in some place other than that in which I found myself,’’ he wrote in the essay, ‘‘On the Approach of Middle Age.” The British author later wrote in his autobiography that he “never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.’’
The ideal traveler
I’ve learned that the more trips you take, the better you become at taking trips. It’s a chance to recalibrate work-life balance. Harder to pin down, though, is what exactly makes an ideal traveler.
A good traveler is someone open to experiences, but not so impressionable that they could be overtaken by them. Someone worldly, perceptive, and able to be where their feet are. An individual who is ready to surrender to a moment but not so vulnerable that they lose track of their own sense of self.
Smaller necessities would probably include curiosity, kindness, enthusiasm, and maybe some skill as a storyteller.
Maugham wrote that the best people to meet on the road are those we can tell are sensible but most aware of the limits of their sense, and those who can grasp the virtue in being senseless now and again. They aren’t prejudiced or agenda-driven, and they should be able to commiserate with locals as well as fellow travelers.
Combining those thoughts with my own, I believe a traveler should be someone grounded enough to have a distinct understanding of who they are, while still being hungry enough to pursue novelty in all forms.
Here’s Maugham in his own words:
“I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment…I am often tired of myself and have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.”
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