The Curse of the Traveler

by darien_gap

Have you ever heard of The Curse of the Traveler?

An old vagabond in his 60s told me about it over a beer in Central America, goes something like this: The more places you see, the more things you see that appeal to you, but no one place has them all. In fact, each place has a smaller and smaller percentage of the things you love, the more things you see. It drives you, even subconsciously, to keep looking, for a place not that's perfect (we all know there's no Shangri-La), but just for a place that's "just right for you." But the curse is that the odds of finding "just right" get smaller, not larger, the more you experience. So you keep looking even more, but it always gets worse the more you see. This is Part A of the Curse.

Part B is relationships. The more you travel, the more numerous and profoundly varied the relationships you will have. But the more people you meet, the more diffused your time is with any of them. Since all these people can't travel with you, it becomes more and more difficult to cultivate long term relationships the more you travel. Yet you keep traveling, and keep meeting amazing people, so it feels fulfilling, but eventually, you miss them all, and many have all but forgotten who you are. And then you make up for it by staying put somewhere long enough to develop roots and cultivate stronger relationships, but these people will never know what you know or see what you've seen, and you will always feel a tinge of loneliness, and you will want to tell your stories just a little bit more than they will want to hear them. The reason this is part of the Curse is that it gets worse the more you travel, yet travel seems to be a cure for a while.

None of this is to suggest that one should ever reduce travel. It's just a warning to young Travelers, to expect, as part of the price, a rich life tinged with a bit of sadness and loneliness, and angst that's like the same nostalgia everyone feels for special parts of their past, except multiplied by a thousand.

Ok, that's the Curse. I don't personally know if I agree with all of it, inasmuch as I think a lot of it can be mitigated by 1) traveling with companions whom you see regularly (although this does reduce the number of people you'd meet, vs traveling alone), and 2) modern technology really does make it possible to stay closer to people all over the world. This internet-enabled world had not yet happened with the man I met in the bar; it was 1998 and he had heard of email, but didn't have an account yet, and therefore is lost to me forever whereas if we'd met a year later, perhaps we'd be Facebook friends to this day.

Well if you really want to get into it, crack open a beer, dim the lights, and listen to this amazing song, Curse of the Traveler by Chris Rea. and Lyrics here.