opinion
| Yellow globe news
“The journey, not the arrival, is important.” – – TS Eliot
2020 put us all on “time out” and we were literally grounded, but now it’s 2021. As restrictions lift, many are cautiously venturing out and waiting to be cleared for travel. Traveling has always been a matter of course – loading everyone into the SUV, or for us it was the station wagon, and going on one of those famous road trips or taking part in that first cruise or tent camping for the first time, or it could have been a backpack abroad .
Writers have become poetic about travel. St. Augustine wrote: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” “Travel – it leaves you speechless, then it makes you a storyteller,” said Ibn Battuta. Travel can be so much – take risks, explore, learn, escape, change, relax and go on an adventure. Like many of you, our early travels were with our children, enjoying the many educational moments as we explored the country. We were young and limited in resources so we bought a tent and later a pop-up RV. You say we don’t remember days, we remember moments, and you, like us, have probably accumulated so many of them.
Our friend of the WT geographer, Bob Sawvell, asked us to join a group in 1983 that was traveling to the USSR. We were political scientist and sociologist to see the world and bring it back to our students. It was a life changing journey that challenged many assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes. We learned on this trip that people are much more similar than they are different. From then on we were enthusiastic and could hardly wait for the last day of class in May. We all have reasons to travel – maybe we’ll experience days of total escape on the beach, see something we’ve never seen before, or retire to the quiet solitude of the mountains. One of our special reasons has always been to learn something.
On a hot afternoon we made our way through the Agora in Athens looking for Socrates’ prison cell because Walt was teaching political theory. We stood five months after the revolution in Bucharest, Romania, and on the starting line in the original Olympic stadium in Greece with a crowd of protesters. In Auschwitz we were sad and humbled by the tragic human stories. In Japan we saw the aftermath of Hiroshima; Later we left our comfort zones to experience public baths separated by sex, once in the city and then in a mountain forest. I shared a hot spring bath with two women, one very old. We learned of the power of the sea on a stormy crossing from Ireland to England, where our ferry could not dock for fear it might break apart. We stood at the foot of the Berlin Wall and remembered history.
There were always random moments of learning – walking through the doors of the Eastern Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Church in Sophia, Bulgaria, to breathtaking beauty, or hoping for a photo just by lifting my camera because the crowd around the bust of Nefertiti USA that was the size of the East German Egyptian Museum (a favorite photo) that goes to a Gdansk shipyard and receives a solidarity banner or slowly moves down the Yangtze in China. Often there was music just around the corner. There were times that were scary – driving through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin for the first time and arriving at midnight on the train with no money in Lisbon, Portugal and taking one person to his cousin’s hotel where it turned out that other guests Angolans were soldiers. We had some of these experiences and better understood why young people don’t tell their parents everything. We certainly haven’t shared these experiences with our children!
When we traveled it was a different time and a different world. Today the world is neither so hospitable nor safe. However, we don’t want to “read just one page”. We want those experiences that will change us forever. Hopefully, when we have good judgment, share concern for each other’s well-being, and understand that the world is no longer the same place it was not long ago, we can hopefully take Mark Twain’s advice and “Sail away from safe haven. Catch the trade winds in our sails. Explore. Dream. Explore. “If not now, maybe it’s time for a road trip!
Linda Shelly taught part-time and full-time at West Texas A&M for 22 years and retired from Amarillo College after 11 years.
