Intrepid Itineraries
Intrepid Itineraries
Ordinary Holidays and Extraordinary Growth
There’s a notion that travel is a kind of therapy. That the physical journeys we take pertain to internal journeys aimed at healing or developing certain aspects of ourselves. Philosopher Alain De Botton says that, ideally, travel agents would be more like therapists, diagnosing our problems and prescribing destinations. Stressed? Try the epic expansiveness of the Grand Canyon or the Lake District. Obsessing too much over your Instagram profile? Go spend time with the down-to-earth folk in Yorkshire or Lancashire.
There is even a body of scientific research suggesting that travel can have curative effects on illnesses such as dementia when memory is engaged by new stimuli. Although, dubiously, the scientists who authored one of the key papers appear to have connections to the travel industry 🤔
In any case, it’s not hard to get on board with the idea that jetting off somewhere can help us heal and grow. New ideas, new people, and new places can interrupt unhelpful patterns and help create new empowering ones. We might end up doing more physical exercise than we normally would at home. There’ll be fresher air and more sunshine. Maybe we’ll eat a more varied diet. Most of all, holidays give us opportunities for fun, surprise, connection, gaining new perspectives, appreciating beauty, and building confidence by overcoming new challenges.
If travel has a therapeutic or developmental effect, then nomadism (i.e., being a working traveller) could be especially effective because of its continuous nature. Transformation takes time. It isn’t the single blow of the hammer that breaks the rock into pieces; it’s the constant pressure applied by the stonecutter as he strikes the rock over and over and over. Holidays may fall short of their full transformational potential because they’re infrequent and over in a flash. Anything we learn on a holiday is easily relegated once we get home and our old habits take over again.
When it’s time to book our next holiday – which we may have had to wait weeks, months or even years to do – it's likely we’ll be eyeing up destinations designed to help us escape from the exhaustion, stress, or tedium that has entered our life in the intervening period. With so much of our psychic energy being used to plan an escape (alongside the demands of work and family and friends and hobbies), there’s not much leftover for thinking about what we want to move towards, what we want to discover and develop in ourselves.
This is where nomadism has an edge over holidays. When we first set out to become nomads, we may approach planning the first destination in the same way we’d approach planning a holiday (i.e., a break from life). But once we’ve been through X cycles of nomadic life, chances are we’ve forgotten the things (or at least the emotional texture of the things) that initially agitated us enough to hit the road in the first place.
And when we’re no longer trying to escape, when our psychic energy stores have been replenished, then we’re able to focus and think more clearly about what we do want. This is a good thing, because defining ourselves by what we don’t want (e.g., I don’t want to go somewhere full of other nomads) leads to a reactive life shaped by avoidance and limitation, rather than a proactive one inspired by aspiration and expansion (e.g., I want to make three new friends this month).
It’s easier to decide what we don’t want than what we do want, because avoiding pain is more urgent than getting pleasure. But here again, nomadism has an advantage because it commits us to an extended cadence of back-to-back travel cycles and their resulting insights.
Within a single cycle, a single trip, we have the chance to experience some of the key developmental moments in what storytellers call the Hero’s Journey: we feel the call to adventure, cross from the known to the unknown, meet mentors, overcome challenges, and return, transformed, ready to use what we’ve learned and go again.
As nomads, the question of “Where should we go next?” can only be answered well by evaluating our recent experiences and answering questions that are further upstream. “What do I value most in life?” “What is my sense of home?” “How do I define success and fulfilment?” “What role do relationships play in my life?” “How do I balance stability and change?” “What is my responsibility towards the communities I interact with?”
When we nomads habitually ask ourselves questions like these, over an extended period of time, and use the answers to try and make better decisions, it is not unlike the commitment one makes to a form of therapy or coaching.
Think about how we might bring some of these growth-oriented perspectives of nomadism into our more conventional holidays. Could our next family holiday, for example, be a chance for deepening familial bonds or teaching kids about different cultures? How might the journey make us reflect on our own upbringing and the legacy we want to pass on?
What about couples holidays? How could we use them to develop a more complex understanding of one another? What new shared experiences could bring us closer? How might overcoming the inevitable travel-related ordeals together fortify our relationship?
Even hen or stag dos (bachelorette or bachelor parties, for those in the States), could be an opportunity to reflect on the nature of friendship, the transition into a new phase of life, or our own views on partnership and commitment.
Every journey, no matter how brief, superficial or hedonistic, is an opportunity for introspection and growth. We don’t need a ticket to an exotic destination. We just need a willingness to ask new questions and put lessons into practice.
See you next time.
– Harrison & Corina
Think your last holiday could've been more than just sunburns and souvenirs? Share this post with your mates and kick off a chat about how we can turn any trip into a real game-changer.
Curious about how travel, writing, and football can mix into an unexpected cocktail of insights? Find out here →