We live in a space where one thinks they are well-travelled by
how many miles they’ve eaten, and how many borders they’ve
escaped; the saying stipulates that travel broadens the mind.
Does it in fact broaden, or merely bloat?
It’s an interesting verb, travel. Its etymology brings us to a word
from the 12th & 13th centuries, that is, to travail, which means to
toil, to labour. Originally, it meant to trouble, torture, or torment,
derived by the Latin term, tripaliare. Why did I bring up the
etymology of this word? Tracing a word’s roots (in our case,
travel), gives us a better understanding of what it means to use
that word. Travel in the middle-ages was an arduous endeavour,
so much so, that its feeling was akin to torture. And so to travel
was not what we see it as it is today, where cargos of humans were
jettisoned onto foreign lands for a sense of escape & adventure,
but something that required great will and motivation.
Coming back to the question, why is it said that travel broadens
the mind? If we invoke the original definition of travel, one would
perhaps say it is because the labour, the hard-work that goes
into travelling, that helps broaden one’s mind. The stress and
strains of camping, hunting, survival, and traversing
differentiating landscapes & climates, is where minds become
broad, and not just merely bloated with data and memoirs. The
modern day pseudo-traveller, in my personal reasoning, wouldn’t
meet this definition, hence I think they are often charlatans of
true travel. They seem aimless, bloating their memories with
places, whilst remaining starved of any mental processing that
might expand, or tint, their cognitive horizons.
I’d like to escape to another point. Does a traveller necessarily
have to physically transport their body in order to be ascribed
that noun, with both early and modern definitions considered? I,
for example, honestly believe that a mind, both broadened and
bloated, is a medium of travel. One can labour (and torture) ones
mind with ease, anyone reading this can empirically attest to
that; such tests have great potential in broadening said minds.
But (contemporary) travel in one’s mind is just as broadening (and
verified) as its old definition. What do I mean by mental
travelling? Minds operate as a tool for travel, which we would label as
imagination and creativity; and the worlds artistic ventures and all
the experiences that stimulate memories into life, are the fuel for
this imagination. People often ask me how I can spend so long in
one place, in one room, all alone in my own company; I correct
them by informing them that it is not loneliness, but solitude; the
distinction is defined by whether one is able to travel whilst
remaining stationary in one location.
I’ve always had this one belief. Have you ever read a novel,
finished it, and years later treat its memory as something you had
embodied? I’m sure most people reading this have read a book
called ‘The Kite Runner’, so allow me to inquire, does a tiny part
of your life not feel as if it once travelled to the country of
Afghanistan? For those of you who don’t, you’re probably
scoffing at my question, it sounds ridiculous. How can one
compare a physical journey to Asia with an imagining inspired by
words alone? But I can’t deny the emotions I feel, and much like
the feeling I have when physically amongst alien waters, I mirror
those perceptions and thoughts when I travel through
imagination. My passports may tell you I’ve only travelled to a
handful of places, but the divine stenographers recording my
journey know all too well that I’ve travelled millions of miles
across the universe; I could tell you how I once found myself
amongst the spectra of Milky Way nebulae whilst my body was
camped next to a loch in Galloway National Forest Park, for
example.
Coming full circle to my original inquiry once more, travel is
certainly not as black and white as you may have originally
perceived, and do not let the miles of your footprints deceive you
into labelling yourself a traveller; justify the title by
encapsulating what all the definitions imply, because although
we are all naturally defined as travellers by virtue of time, the
labour, twinned with mental journeys, is how one realises the
predicate in the age-old saying of ‘travel broadens the mind’.
By Hashmat Ali
