Why You Should Go Away
Travel is more than a means to discover yourself. It’s a way to be better.
Some people have deep roots.
The Coast Salish people believe that when Creator made the world, the brothers Coyote and Fox were sent first to free the land of evil and make it ready for the arrival of humans. But Coyote is a coyote, and so he left behind jealousy, greed, hunger, and all the other problems that plague us today.
In the mythology of the Coast Salish, as with many other indigenous groups, the people have been in the land from the very beginning. As much a part of it as the mountains and the rivers and the sea that scrapes the rocky shore.
We think differently. The earliest evidence of the very first humans in North America goes back about 16,000 years, making it one of the final chapters in the long story of the emigration of our species from its original African home. I’ve seen paintings older than that. We’ve been exiles from the Garden for 700 centuries now, and still we feel on our backs the heat of the Angel’s flaming sword.
Wandering and exile are part of who we are.
It has been since the very beginning. And the same blood flows through our veins today, still making itself heard under the chatter of free Wi-Fi and the blurry fog of endless electronic notifications. The need to know what lies beyond that next hill. The fascination with the dark snow-scarred ridge of the mountains. The pull of the boundless sea.
No good ever comes from ignoring these impulses. William Hazlitt once said that a man can only achieve his destiny in the country of his birth, but I disagree. Most of us can only achieve our full potential by moving away.
The New World was founded on this kind of attitude to freedom and space. After a couple of years, bears chase their children away. You’re supposed to leave home, decreed by nature and by culture. But it’s getting harder, and it’s getting rarer.
For decades now, the rate of internal migration within the US has been falling. It’s a sign of the times. Housing is getting increasingly unaffordable. Aging parents live longer and require more care. Careers start later, when they start at all.
And if it’s getting harder to move inside the country, the idea of moving outside of it becomes even more daunting. There are a thousand reasons to stay where you are. It’s familiar. It’s safe. It’s easy.
But if we were born for safety, we’d have shells on our backs like turtles and move no more than they do. We’re not born for safety, but for adventure. And the adventure is not in here. It’s out there.
Your environment shapes you.
No matter what you do, you’ll carry it with you. The shadows of the iron bars become the stripes on the tiger’s hide. A light that’s bright enough can burn permanent shadows into anything it touches. A light so bright it can burn almost everything away.
You won’t find a light like that at home.
You are who you are partly because of where you are. Every good gardener knows that by adding baking soda to the soil, you can change hydrangea flowers from blue to pink. Every school child has seen a rose suck up food coloring from its vase until the petals change to match the color of the dye.
This goes deeper than that. What you are, ultimately, is the same thing a flower is. An assemblage of certain parts of the universe, a wrinkle on the face of infinity. It’s physics as much as metaphysics.
Change the soil, and you change the plant.
Change where you stand, and you change what you’ll see. And while there are consolations and raptures and joys that come from a life lived in one place, with roots as old and thick as the ones that hold up the sky, nothing will make you more open to the world in all its magnificence and mundanity as seeing as much of it as you can.
It wasn’t until Dante was exiled from Florence that he began the Divine Comedy and gave the Italian language its great masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov never wrote a work of true genius until he moved to America and began writing in English.
Robert Zimmerman moved to New York. Bob Dylan left it.
Changing where you live can change who you are. And if the great artists of the past had stayed in the towns they were born in, we might never have the life-enriching beauty they created in their new surroundings.
But when the rising moon begins to climb
Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there;
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time,
And the low night-breeze waves along the air
The garland-forest, which the gray walls wear,
Like laurels on the bald first Cæsar’s head;
When the light shines serene but doth not glare,
Then in this magic circle raise the dead:
Heroes have trod this spot — ’tis on their dust ye tread.
Byron could never have written those lines in his dreary English homeland, not with all the opium and brandy in the world. He needed that long Roman light that turns marble into gold and makes the past shine on a poet’s page.
You don’t have to be a great artist to gain the benefits of exile.
The imagination feeds on new experiences, and nothing will show you more plainly who you are and all you could be than finding yourself in a place where no one knows you.
Having to fashion for yourself a new life away from everything and everyone you knew is the highest form of freedom. And to imagine and then create, whether it’s art or engineering or the narrative of your own life, is the true calling of our species.
Easy for me to say, maybe. I never liked the town I grew up in. I left at 20 and never came back, except for visits to the family who still live there. I’ve loved many places I’ve seen since and never stayed in any one of them for too long. Because there’s something else that leaving gives you that you’ll never get any other way.
There’s an aspect of love, for people or for places, that you’ll never experience unless you one day leave them behind. The bittersweet sublimity of loss. It’s hard to imagine a book more quintessentially Dublin than Ulysses, but it was written in Trieste and Zürich and Paris. An entire world on one particular summer’s day, conjured out of the unfulfilled longing of lifelong exile.
We all carry our own world within us.
A tiny universe of one, swirling in the back of our eyes. That world is not immaculate. Our skulls are not impermeable. Everywhere you go and everything you see will react with your inner life in a way you can’t predict before it happens. Life is an unending dialogue between you and the sky.
There is a resonance that comes only from unfamiliar surroundings, from standing on the sunlit edge of a new world. It’s not that you discover yourself in these moments. It’s that you become someone else. A bolder and better version of who you always were.
You don’t need to be James Joyce. You don’t have to stay away forever. If you love the place you’re from, you can always return.
But you do need to leave. If only to make that love more clear and complete. Perhaps you’ll find a new appreciation for the place you were born once you’ve seen a little more of the rest of the world.
Or maybe, you’ll find places that harmonize with your personality far better than where you were born. And then maybe, like me, you’ll never go home again.