Endorsing Wanderlust: Travel to Live, Travel to Learn

By OOI KEE BENG, Cover story for Penang Monthly September 2024

A baby should cry at birth. It must be traumatic being born. The compressing comfort of the womb is gone, the noises and lights once gleaned through the mother’s body are now unfiltered.

The first journey the former foetus takes is a watery slide, and then its umbilical cord is cut. No more automatic feeding. Trauma indeed.

Then follows the shock of endless new impressions from an endlessly extended world outside the womb. No wonder babies have to sleep all the time. Good trauma therapy and a perfect getaway.

It then grows into the world, learning to manage its own body, and to manage the world, first through cries, then yells, and perhaps tantrums, and then through words. All the while, if it is lucky, its ignorance of the world is shielded by loving adults. It can learn at its own pace and travel through its young life, through time and space, decreasing its ignorance of the world and its inability to survive on its own.

This learning process I would like to equate with “Travel”. If you think about it, for a child to move from home to the shopping mall is quite an adventure. It has to survive a barrage of signals, contacts and meaningless noise. It has to learn to crawl, walk, run, climb, in order to get places. It has to test all sorts of food and drinks, and have opinions about them that it has to communicate to its surroundings. Above all, it has to communicate. It has to learn to understand words and speak words. It has to learn to know its surroundings’ preferred ways of expression and behaviour.

That is quite a journey. An odyssey, no less. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. And that’s only for starters. No easy thing being a child.

So you can’t blame a child for thinking up ways to travel more slowly, to pick its own paths to travel, or to avoid destinations and situations it does not feel comfortable with. All these choices in the end will form the basis for the child’s character.

Have you noticed how happy a child becomes when it first learns how to walk? And shocked and please that he can actually pull it off? Travel begins there. It is a physical accomplishment, to start with. Physical Skills are then followed by Social Skills. How to get what you want, even before words, requires interaction with other beings. That boosts our ability to learn, and our agency.

Language as Super-vehicle

For most of us, language is the vehicle on which we travel the fastest—into life, into society, and into the world. It is the high-speed rail of our trip through life. But more than just a social tool, the language we learn to read opens up destinations that we never can imagine existed. Children’s books are a great blessing here. Then there are comics, cartoons, things we can access because we have learned to read. Nowadays, we have computer games overwhelm us with imagined worlds.

Choices being endless at this point along our journey, the paths we choose to avoid become as telling as the ones we favour.

At some point, the risk is high that the child decides that he has learned enough. He does not have to response to impulses as if he is ignorant of what they are. He can decide what they are. He learns that he can sort them through his words, and make them seem predictable things with ready explanations. That’s when the child decides to stop travelling. Lifelong learning stops because he has learned enough to get by. He now has a philosophy, an ideology, a religion.

Travel as an epistemological journey can actually end in order to suspend the painful experience of always not knowing enough, of the world hitting you with unknowns. Curiosity has its price. It’s not only cats that pay with their lives for being curious.

Both the young and adults, however, can reach a point when they decide that they now know enough. They understand the world, no new thing can surprise them because they do have an explanation for it, and they can place it within their ready ideological tapestry.

Traveller or Tourist

Therein lies the point of my somewhat belaboured introduction, tying travel to the search for knowledge that defines everyone’s life. We are able to stop being curious, isn’t that a curious observation? To keep to my line of thinking, isn’t that where we actually differentiate “The Traveller” from “The Tourist” whenever we wish to malign a certain attitude we observe in a certain type of superficial traveller? The tourist is no longer suffering from his curiosity. He is no longer even an observer. He sightsees, he nods his self-satisfied head, he snaps a shot to remind himself of what he could not properly absorb, consider or remember in front of him.

In truth, there is a price to be paid for learning, for travelling. Your worldview takes knocks if you remain curious and realise that all you know is tentative.

As at the moment of birth, travel trauma remains always possible throughout your life. Travelling to a situation that challenges your physical, social and intellectual habits can be exciting, but an overdose is always possible. The point where you feel overwhelmed differs between individuals, no doubt, but none of us can really adapt to anything imaginable.

At this juncture, we see why it is useful to equate Travel with Learning. Travel with Life, in fact.

Personally, I have found it easy to sympathise with certain autistic persons. Deciding that the world is too full of impulses to handle is a totally rational position to take in life. In fact, one could argue that as we develop our intellectual capacity and work out ideas for ourselves, all of us seek a point at which we think we know enough. We slow done our travelling.

For most of us, learning is conceptually and experientially tied to being in school. And when schooling stops, learning also stops, in a sense. After that, we are usually tied to a career where learning is a guided tour within which you learn a profession, you learn “best practices”. We get through life, we go through the business of living, we travel less and less, we get less and less curious, we become “practical”. No time for much else. Life has taken over.

But is that correct? Has life taken over, or has life been taken over? Have we stopped being a traveller, and instead accepted life as a guided tour?

Wondering about Wanderlust

Relevant to our discussion is a word that is seldom used nowadays—wanderlust. It seems a self-explanatory term, and having it is often a mixed blessing.