Spontaneity in all walks of life

When you move to another country, when do you begin to feel off the road? Does it take a week, a few months, a stationed apartment and a lease? Behind your apartment doors, sure, you are likely to feel less like a road-roaming warrior. But when do you begin to feel like the new life you have made for yourself has fallen into the tedious repetition of your former state?

When I’ve moved to a new country, it’s always taken a long time to feel like I am no longer traveling because every day is full of such newness. However, I’ve always applied this philosophy to every walk of my life, and have found that most other serious travelers do as well. So, I was shocked when I found my coworkers bemoaning the upcoming weekend trip organized by our company administrators. In the lounge, I heard one coworker quip, “Yeah, I have better things to do. I mean, I’m already up to the third season on Lost.”

What?

It takes some doing to get here. If my Visa experience alone can speak of the possible difficulties, it’s obvious that you have to really want this to make it happen. Why move literally half way around the world, through 14 time zones, to an entirely different culture only to fight to stay within the same boundaries of our former lifestyle? It goes back to the age-old backpacker conundrum: Do we travel across the globe to do the same things that we do at home? We’ve all seen those travelers who sit around the hostel doing little more than drinking and watching movies.

My employers wish to take our full staff, roughly 30 people, on an all expenses paid weekend trip to a little area of the country that even the locals haven’t heard of. We don’t have to deal with the tedium of arranging transportation. All meals are paid for, and we are put up in a nice hotel. Wait – no hostels? No Couchsurfing? No “sleeping” in a freezing train station? What luxury!

We should be so lucky. Considering the tragic differences in the dispersion of wealth across the globe and between individual countries, these are the times when I feel stupidly lucky. An all expenses paid weekend just so a group of people can get to know each other better? Sounds like luxury to me. Personally, things like these do not register with the drone of duty, but with the zeal of possibility, and perhaps this is what sets some of us apart and makes us Travelers.

It’s only a little over a month into our contracts, and people are already shirking new adventures to sit at home and watch reruns of American television shows. I’m not condemning television here. I am not one of those staunch elitists who believe that all television is poison.

But, whatever your weekend adventures comprise, this small trip is a break from the norm. When, and more importantly, why do we stop seeing things as an opportunity for experience? Anything can happen. Maybe I’m just overly optimistic, and mischievous enough to see the potential for a hysterical good time in anything. But upon hearing my coworker’s words, I immediately thought of Rolf’s recent travel quote and how this can ring so true for some of us.

When we are on the road we greet each new event as an opportunity for something unique. Shouldn’t our propensity toward new experiences translate seamlessly between our on and off the road selves? Do we set ourselves up for the mundane by assuming that these off the road experiences are nothing more than tedium?