“I don’t want comfort…” On travel and Aldous Huxley

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

This quote stopped me in my tracks this week. I’m a lover of Huxley’s works and of course Brave New World is a classic. I’m a gypsy at heart and I was born to gypsy parents. When I get too comfortable, I get listless, I get bored, my mind wanders and so does my heart, even when my body cannot. I have a soul that “wants,” in so many capacities.

This is why I travel: because “god” is in the faces of the people I meet in rice paddies on islands in the middle of the Mekong. Because poetry is in a lightning storm over my favourite volcano, and in the drums beating in an African midnight and in the sun rising behind the ruins of Angkor Wat. The danger makes me feel alive. The freedom fuels my creativity, my passions, my very juices. I’m one of those people who wants to believe in the goodness of the world, and travel reassures me of that every single day. Being taken in by a stranger, fed from the bowl of a smiling little child, sheltered from the rain by a laughing toothless woman, invited to work, ankle deep in the mud, alongside women who can communicate with me only with smiles and eyes. As to the sin, my feet are never far from that, I’m afraid… but then again what the road teaches you is that sin is relative, and is a teacher more than anything. Somewhere in the deep dark I learned to let go of everything but the lesson and step into the light.