Freedom to Travel
Barranco, Lima, Peru
In all of my journeys, I have never lost the gratitude I carry with me like a coin in my pocket for simply having the freedom to travel. By some stroke of good fortune or karmic past I was lucky enough to be born in the United States. No matter what one’s life challenges may be, by simply being born in the United States one is automatically afforded freedoms and luxuries that many people around the world will only spend their entire lifetime dreaming of. It is like winning a lottery ticket at birth. One of these great freedoms for every U.S. ticket holder is the freedom to travel.
Some years ago, while sitting in a tea shop overlooking a beautiful Zen garden in Kyoto, Japan, I was astonished to read that as of 1990 only 5% of American citizens held a U.S. passport. Today that statistic is up to just 50%. Consider that only a fraction of those who have one will ever actually use it. I know many people who have a passport but have never been anywhere nor have any future plans to travel. For $130 anyone can get a U.S. passport and go anywhere in the world. This will change their perspective and change their life.
When I was 18, I had my first adventure to Southeast Asia, the Philippines. I watched as children bathed in the river with dead animals, went to sleep terrified of rats bigger than cats biting me in the night and sat around the floor with a family whose dog we ate for dinner. These experience alone of a completely different culture and standard of living turned my perspective upside down. I vowed to myself never to go back and resume the American way of living as it had been handed down to me. I now had a much bigger view of the world. Following that first adventure, it would be many years before I would travel again.
Many years later, I live very humbly in countries that are well below the standards we have come to expect in places like the United States. For many people I have met along the way, from China to Japan to South America, the idea of freedom to travel to another country of one’s choosing is a far and unachievable dream way off in the distance, one that most will never see.
In Japan, I remember my old friend Shunichi “Shoe” from my painting class. He was many years older than me and had worked his entire life as a salary man in the soul-crushing Japanese corporate infrastructure. He had earned a salary his entire life and said to me, “I envy you and the life you live. It would be my dream.” He could have easily afforded the life I was living but in his mind and in his culture it seemed impossible.
If you are a Peruvian citizen, taking a trip to a place like the U.S. is a dream and isn’t as simple as going online and buying your ticket and showing up at the airport. It might take you up to a year to get an appointment to be interviewed for a visa to the U.S. Freedom of travel isn’t guaranteed and most people in Peru will never see outside of Peru.
I will never take for granted the freedom to travel. It doesn’t require much money, as I have proven again and again. It only requires freedom.
Field Notes
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book…or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
-Anais NinTravelogues
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Zen and Ink Journals represents hundreds of hours of writing over the past decade, sometimes from a train in remote China or a coffee shop in Kyoto, a hammock in Costa Rica or a simple cabin on a mountaintop in Boquete, Panama or Ciudad Colón.
On these pages, I share my observations of kindness and beauty from my adventures in the world and invite you to listen quietly for the call within you to explore the places that beckon your soul.
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