go on a walk

I took this on a walk around Holešovice: Any kind of travel, either by tram or by foot, assists in the lucidity of the mind

The psychological aspect of travel is something that is of significant interest to me. As I read de Botton’s first three chapters I wondered about what I was thinking during the moments in between seeing new sights. I agreed with his musings on the imagination and its importance while viewing a new scenery, that “the destination [is] not really the point” (32). I had mentioned in an earlier post that when I decided to study abroad this semester, I was quite impulsive and tried to not anticipate anything before my journey. I avoided thinking about my future placement; I could not imagine my own body in another world, because my mind was trapped inside a body that could not possibly understand what it would feel like to be halfway around the world. I knew that I wanted to escape from what I already knew. Isolation and separation from the familiar seemed idyllic. The “poignant and enticing” (52) loneliness that can be seen in Edward Hopper’s paintings were not an image for me, btu rather an anticipation of a feeling.I have always loved the act of travel and the blind wandering that it allows. I remember sitting on the school bus as a child and staring out the window, simply watching the scenery as a blur of shapes and colors. Just as I was aware then, I am aware now that there is a certain amount of glass between my eyes and that mess of scenery that passes by. The travel I was anticipating this semester was that of the mind rather than the body. Because I focused barely at all on how the senses would be affected, I concentrated on how my mind would feel in a completely foreign environment. Living in New York City had made me able to become comfortable in physical loneliness, but I felt that I needed psychological solitariness, and I feel that de Botton’s description as journeys being the ‘midwives of thought’ (54) fit my desires of a change in the ordinary physical practices, such as walking to class with the same scenery. A new environment would allow me to clear my mind of those “habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world” (58).I have, of course, kept the habits that I feel help my mind to move forward with ease. I have attended Bikram Yoga classes here in Prague; I think that meditation certainly assists in mental clarity and focus, as well as the clearing out of that which does not help on the journeys I go though in my mind. I believe that the act of travel is necessary for me, even if not to foreign places. After all, it is the art of travel, not the act of travel. That art is something that occurs within one’s mind and affects one’s demeanor as well as presence within the world. To travel does not require a plane or even a train. Two feet are just fine.