Book Review: “How to Travel”
On a recent trip to New York City, I stumbled across the cerulean blue cover of a perfect carry-on sized paperback with the alluringly gilded title: “How to Travel.” I typically reach for anything that falls within the travel lit genre when perusing bookstores, so naturally I couldn’t pass this one up. Never having heard of The School of Life publishing house, my interest was piqued by this book’s subtitle of, “a philosophical guide to fulfilling journeys.” The other honest appeal was the book’s easy-to-digest format of 30 short essays interspersed with quotes, notes pages and atypical travel photographs.
Once home, I jumped into its pages and was richly rewarded with snippets of thought-provoking prose, which in strikingly simple ways caused my mind to twist and bend a bit. While some of the essays did repeat some generally publicized travel wisdom (such as Travelling for Perspective and The Importance of Family Holidays), the majority either reminded me of a way of thinking about my own travels that needed to be dusted off or turned more than one of my previously held ideas on its head.
“... this is only one of many possible worlds.”
In the segment The Pleasure of the Airport, for example, the words cast a decidedly positive light on this junction of so many experiences. Our stopovers at the airport should remind us, “to keep in mind everything we’ve learnt of alternative realities … that nothing here is normal … that this is only one of many possible worlds.” As a child, I was surely more in awe of the airport experience than I am now, but this transitional space can still serve as a prompt to be more consciously aware of the version of the world I left behind as well as the one just outside the doors.
In these post-Covid years of travel, I have been acutely sensitive to the alarming numbers of fellow travelers I meet on my own journeys and, truthfully, embittered by this situation. All the while knowing and recognizing that we are all “part of the problem,” but feeling quite powerless in how to counter this disturbing, and in some cases, destructive trend. The piece In Defence of Crowds, suggests a delightfully simple and actionable change in mindset that may just have the potential to ease some of these emotions. Explaining that, “we don’t hate people, we’re just missing the sense of dignified shared devotion,” this piece challenges us to, “turn the idea of a group from an insult to a virtue: to make belonging as nice as it can be.”
This little tome on how to travel pushes the mind in interesting, relatable and engaging ways to ensure that future journeys more fully live up to our expectations of them as life-changing experiences – a goal Experience Wanderlust shares with those who penned these pages.
