I have spent the last three weeks traveling in Eastern Europe. I have traveled a lot in my life. In my 20s, I lived in Japan, India, and China, backpacked around the world for two years, and even hitchhiked around Afghanistan at one point. This more recent trip was short and easy compared to the ones I took in those days–3 weeks in Croatia, Serbia, and Hungary, including a spectacular 17-hour train ride across the Dinaric Alps. But as brief as it was, it brought up everything I love about travel–all the excitement and fear and uncertainty and joy.
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Travel has played a vital role in my development as a writer. The more I travel, the more I realize that I’ve brought essential lessons from my journeys into my writing, often without even being aware of it. The most important of those lessons is one I come back to again and again. It is the importance of viewing the world as a child.
Children see the world without the layers and layers of assumptions and expectations that adults have built up over years of living. The world is still new to them, and so everything is an exploration. Viewing the world through the eyes of a child makes us open to new experiences and gives us a fresh, wide-eyed perspective. Cultivating a childlike perspective is one of the most rewarding things we can do as travelers or as writers.
The Child and the Traveler
The second time I went to India, I was with a group of seven graduate students, all of us on a full fellowship to study Hindi for a year. One of the participants was a doctoral student from Columbia University I’ll call Karen. Karen was from New York. She was smart, confident, good-looking, and urbane. She carried herself with a kind of East Coast bravado so often seen in people from northeastern cities. She thought of herself as sophisticated, with good reason.
Of all the students on the trip, you would think that someone so self-confident would have the easiest time adjusting to a new culture. Instead, Karen floundered. She was unhappy, depressed, and frustrated. She complained constantly and talked about how much she wished she was back in New York. While the rest of us were gradually learning to navigate the complex culture of India, Karen became increasingly isolated.
What Karen was struggling with was an inability to become a child again. But, when you’re in a different culture, that’s exactly what you are. Like a child, you don’t fully understand the customs, you’re often unclear about the rules of everyday interactions, and you aren’t sure what is expected of you. You understand the language imperfectly if at all. You sometimes need help with even simple tasks.You often feel incompetent, even ridiculous. It’s humbling, to be sure, but to fully experience a place–to derive the full joy of the journey–you have to embrace the child within you.
The Child’s Perspective and the Writer
Every time you sit down at that keyboard, you are visiting a new country. You have some idea what is going to happen, but you can never be completely sure. You may have written a bestselling novel–you may even have written twenty—but that is no assurance you can do it again. When you sit down at that keyboard or take up your pen, your competence is immediately called into question, and there are no nice, clear rules to guide you.
If you fight that uncertainty, if you try to be the sophisticated urbanite who already knows all there is to know, you’ll be like the poor New Yorker in India, struggling unsuccessfully to get by in a different culture. Instead, be a child. Accept the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing (who does?) and admit you’re confused, even a little scared.
Cultivating a child’s perspective does more than allow you to meet the challenges of writing (or travel). It also also allows you to relax and enjoy the ride. Whether you are traveling or writing or simply going through life day to day, being childlike opens you up to possibilities and invites you to savor all the adventure and excitement of life.
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Terrific thoughtful post. Thanks for writing it.
Thanks!