I’ve been thinking about traveling and the people I meet when I travel. How easily we connect to kindred spirits for a moment, and then let them go. And I was also thinking too about why I want to tell stories about my travels, the two being intertwined.
Before Facebook (et al), it used to be that people didn’t tell their stories. The only stories people wanted to hear were about the famous or the infamous: those who stood out from the crowd for fabulous fortune or unimaginable tragedy or crimes. When you stand out from the crowd, you no longer belong in it.
Nowadays, we all want to tell our stories; not just to family and friends but to those in the crowd, to those on the same journey. The Journey is where we reveal, explain, and show ourselves to others. We are all on our own personal journey. But then there are the communal journeys too, real and fictional, mostly religious pilgrimages of penance. Some that come to mind are: El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (The Way), and el Hajj, the Muslim’s pilgrimage to Mecca. Chaucer’s fictional Canterbury Tales was “a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims from all walks of life as they travel together to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.” All these journeys express a common yearning: we are part of this pilgrimage, we belong with these people, we have at least done this in our lives.
As for personal journeys, I am endlessly fascinated why some people move from place to place, city to city, even continent to continent, and why others stay all their lives where they were born. I am even more fascinated by personal stories. “He didn’t give me the time of day” is a saying that means, he didn’t acknowledge me; he didn’t look me in the eye; he didn’t see me for who I am. Was it because he thinks I am nobody, not worthy of his attention? At heart, we all want to be acknowledged, must be acknowledged for the human being we are. In our eyes is contained the story of our life. On the journey called El Hajj, (Hajj means to set out towards something) all items of everyday clothing are abandoned for white cloth, to make everyone equal in Allah’s eyes. Each pilgrim walks in a million-strong throng counter-clockwise seven times around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building which contains the black stone, the Muslim’s focus of prayer. El Camino de Santiago de Compostela is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela where the remains of St. James are said to lie. Today, people from all over the world walk the 500 miles, telling their stories to the other pilgrims they meet along the way. And in the Canterbury Tales, the stories are told by all the classes present: their stories, not their class, are the focus.
The movement forward, from a profane to a sacred place, brings a new space for understanding, for acceptance, tolerance and humility. But I think, in the end, the journey can also be one that takes place just where you are.