Traveling can do so much for us. So many people have written about how much they learned from other cultures, and themselves, by leaving behind the known, the culture they grew up with, and immersing themselves in another place. I love listening to Travel with Rick Steves on NPR, or reading travel books by Pico Iyer. When I was in College, I took 4 months to hitch-hike through Europe. It was one of the most formative times in my life. Same with being in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, hitch-hiking across the US, traveling with my wife for a month in Greece. But since COVID, I haven’t traveled very much.
And it’s not just that we learn from where we arrive. We can learn from the mere fact of moving from place to place with awareness.
We frequently get caught up in one place or way of doing things. We look out the window of our home, maybe into a garden, street, or city. Maybe we enjoy it, maybe not. But we create a momentary identity space. And then we might lose touch with how the yard or garden spreads to the hills beyond it, or to the street and the city, or neighboring nations.
I walk almost every day and pick a route, places to go and see, but really, I could go almost anywhere. I’m limited only by my concept of what the walk should be. Our ideas about what we’ll meet on the road can limit how and what we greet.
There’s space, miles, and there’s time. We might want to go someplace. Go to a doctor, visit a friend. And we want to be there now. We want to “cheat” space by speeding through time, by driving faster, or diverting ourselves with music and podcasts as we move, so we don’t feel “are we there yet?” Driving can be a good time for music and such. But time and space, as Einstein and others have shown, cannot be separated.
Buddhism and other spiritual and philosophical approaches share a similar perspective yet turn it in an engaging direction. They remind us change is constant and everything impermanent. Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen teacher, poet, and philosopher said we, all things, are time. “Time itself is being.” “The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers.” In this moment, I am dependent upon and enmeshed with all beings in all time.
Driving, or that time in the airport or those minutes in a subway, can be a great opportunity to learn from others. By being mindful of our feelings, we learn an important lesson about ourselves and how we experience time. Of course, what we learn traveling we can learn anytime we pause to study ourselves. But traveling makes time and change so obvious.
Dogen said, “Do not think that time merely flies away…If time merely flies away, you would be separate from time.” Imagine driving a long distance. Just a few weeks ago, my wife and I drove 8 hours to visit my brother and sister-in-law. And I noticed the obvious⎼ when we’re driving, we’re always moving. Then we stop, get out to pump gas or go to the bathroom. And internally, we’re still on the road; or still focused on a destination other than where we are. So, when we stop, it takes effort to feel that moment in that space. We’re not fully alive to where we are.
We often mentally limit ourselves to what’s within our skin or conceptual border, so everything else is considered outside us. Our culture trains us in such limitation. It also trains us to think of time as moving in a linear fashion abstracted from us and the rest of existence. This exaggerates the borders or spaces between us, and between here and there. Yet the universe is open. We have to re-train ourselves, so even the limits are ways to touch the limitless.
We can take a seat in a quiet room. Sit back, let go of writing, or whatever we were doing, and just feel the space around us. Maybe, we can start with feeling our feet on the floor. To feel the space in our feet from toes to heel, side to side. Or in our hands, to feel the space our thumbs take up, from nail to knuckle. Or our upper body, shoulder to shoulder, chest to back. Or feel the space from eyes to back of head, ear to ear.
In Dissolving Pain: Simple Brain Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain, Les Fehmi and Jim Robbins introduce us to this practice which I found valuable:
“Can [we] imagine paying attention to the feeling of space the whole room occupies?” “Imagine paying attention to the feeling of space that [our] whole body occupies?” The size of the room. The space from this body to the wall in front, the walls to the sides, walls behind, above, below.
Or maybe extend the exercise. Can we imagine the space outside and above the room? And go further out and look down on the building we’re in. See the block we’re on. Going higher still, and see the whole town, village, city. The nation. The world from outer space. Imagine we’re the whole universe looking. The infinity of space revealed by the finite limits of our sensing.
There are so many of us. Over 8 billion humans and counting.
On the one hand, it’s wonderful to be surrounded by so many. We see a face in a crowd or someone sitting alone on a bench. Do we realize not only a whole life is sitting there, but a whole universe? Each human is a potentially shared revelation or intimate reflection.
And on the other hand, we can taste humanity in the very air and feel crowded or threatened by others. With the climate emergency, and especially since COVID and the politically motivated threats from DJT and associates, the threat level from other humans seems so present. These threats make us want to harden our borders. The biggest joys as well as the biggest dangers to us are ourselves and other people.
And we carry these threats with us always, both when we see others, or look in the mirror. Even if we’re not conscious of it, the threat, or the opposite, the potential for revelation or wonder, that we might perceive in others we carry in ourselves. We need to practice how to find space and time ⎼ for other people to enter and for us to welcome ourselves. We need relationships and we need solitude.
So, when we drive any distance, we must remember we’re always getting to where we always are. From here to there is continuous air, time, life. Space is not some hole in existence. “Empty” space, is empty just enough to let everything in.
And just as the boundary provided by the skin of our hands makes touching possible, all boundary lines can do the same. So, with care and awareness, let’s learn to let our boundaries express, in the way we touch and are touched, who we are as one moment of space and time.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock