On Travel: Wisdom from Kent Nerburn
Selected excerpts from Letters to My Son
A call to risk the unknowns of traveling for the sake of the benefits to be gained.
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I have never met anyone who didn't at least once feel the lure of the road and the call of distant spaces. Wanderlust, the urge for adventure, and the desire to know what is over the next hill are like echoes in the backs of our minds that speak of sounds not quite heard and places not quite seen.
For some, these echoes are distant and small. They are easily put aside in favor of the closer, more immediate pursuits of building a life and a home and a family. For others, they are as loud as the sea and never go away, no matter how strong the desire to settle and build.
You should listen to these echoes. Take the chances and follow the voices that call you to distant places. Live, if only for a short time, the life of a traveler. It is a life you will always cherish and never forget.
The magic of travel is that you leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity, but as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in space and time. You return a different person.
When I had set out on my travels, I had expected to see beauty, but nothing like this. I could not claim this experience; It could only claim me. I was no longer myself. New truths rushed in on me like great winds. Colors I had never seen and spaces I had never felt washed over me and took me to unknown regions of my spirit. I was giddy and disoriented. My old self had been sloughed off like a false skin and in its place stood someone new, larger, unknown to me. I would never again be the same.
All you need to do is give yourself over to the unknown. It doesn't have to be on a vast, dreamlike Arctic plane. It can be on a gentle stroll through a Wisconsin forest or on a street corner in Nairobi. What matters is that you leave the comfort of the familiar and open yourself to a world totally apart from your own.
Slowly, memories of the familiar recede from your mind, and you find yourself adrift in the experience of the world around you. Your thoughts and concerns change. Your emotions focus on new people and events. The world makes its claim on your heart and mind, and you are free, at least momentarily, from the concerns of your everyday life.
Many people don’t want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people’s lives while never really leaving their own. They try to bring their world with them wherever they go or try to recreate the world they left. They do not want to risk the security of their own understanding and see how small and limited their experiences really are.
To be a real traveler, you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the center of your universe. You must believe totally in the lives of the people in the places where you find yourself, even if it undermines your faith in the life you left behind.
You need to share with them, participate with them. Sit at their tables, go to their streets. Struggle with their language. Tell them stories of your life and hear the stories of theirs. Watch how they love each other, how they fight each other. See what they value and what they fear. Feel the spaces they keep in their lives.
Become part of the fabric of their everyday lives and you will get a sense of what it means to live in their world. Give yourself over to them — embrace them rather than judge them — and you’ll find that the beauty in their lives and their world will become part of yours.
When you move on, you will have grown. You will realize that the possibilities of life in this world are endless, and that beneath our differences of language and culture, we all share the dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow.
Travel is not as romantic and exotic as you imagine it. The familiar will always call. Your sense of rootlessness will not give you rest. Your emotions will fly crazily in all directions until sometimes you will feel that you have lost your moorings. If you travel alone, the warmth of families and couples will break your heart, and your loneliness will plunge you to depths you didn’t think possible.
And then, there are greater dangers. You may wake one day and find that you have become a runner who uses travel as an escape from the problems and complications of trying to build something with your life. You may find that you have stayed away one hour or one day or one month too long and that you no longer belong anywhere or to anyone. You may find that you have been caught by the lure of the road and that you are a slave to dissatisfaction with any life that forces you to stay in one place.
These things happen. But how much worse is it to be someone whose dreams have been buried beneath the routines of life and who no longer has an interest in looking beyond the horizon?
I believe it is worth taking the risk. How else will you know the feeling of standing on something ancient, or hearing the silent roar of empty spaces? How else will you be able to look into the eyes of a man who has no education, never left his village, and does not speak your language, and know that the two of you have something in common? How else will you know, in your heart, that the whole world is precious and that every person and place has something unique to offer?
Travel, no matter how humble, will etch new elements into your character. You will know the cutting moments of life where fear meets adventure and loneliness meets exhilaration. You will know what it means to push forward when you want to turn back.
And when you have tragedies or great changes in your life, you will understand that there are a thousand, a million ways to live, and that your life will go on to something new and different and every bit as worthy as the life you are leaving behind.
Because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. I know which parts of myself I cannot deny and which parts of myself are simply choices that I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chance, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am.
When I am old and my body has begun to fail me, my memories will be waiting for me. They will lift me and carry me over mountains and oceans. I will hold them and turn them and watch them catch the sunlight as they come alive once more in my imagination. I will be rich, and I will be at peace. I want you to have that peace, too.
That is why we need to travel. If we don’t offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small, and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don’t lift to the horizon; we don’t hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.
Don't let yourself become one of these people. The fear of the unknown and the lure of the comfortable will conspire to keep you from taking the chances the traveler has to take. But if you take them, you will never regret your choice. To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away. In the end, you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all the risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you will have gained.
About the Author
Kent Nerburn is an American author, sculptor, and educator. He has written numerous books, often focusing on Native American culture and spirituality. His notable works include “Letters to My Son,” “Voices in the Stones,” and "The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo." He also writes on general spirituality and reflections on everyday life. Nerburn is known for his writings that bridge cultural understanding and explore themes of spirituality and the human experience, often with a focus on Native American perspectives.