We Travel

We are prisoners.

Not of any penal institution in particular but of self-perception. And stuck there by obvious, lazy, predictable comfort.

And nothing helps us escape this zone better than stepping out of the over-valued, over-flattered, and probably over-sung country in which we were born. Escaping our familiar contexts seems one of the better and most tangible reset buttons that life, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to have us believe was our idea. Better than movies, better than the internet, better than meth, I've been told. It was instrumental in my, and probably every immigrant’s path to re-considering not only the possible causes of a self unborn, but notions of citizenry and how we nourish identity.

I travel as much as I can possibly afford, for I know that the crossing of borders and the changes in points of view, literal and metaphorical, supply me with a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of curiosity. While in Peru in October 2015, as part of my family’s decision to take a year-long sabbatical, I started reflecting (as one does on a four-day trek to Huayna Picchu) about how millions of people lucky enough to go beyond their native lands, spend their time, record their memories, think about "travel" at all! Do they think about it as exploration or vacation?

“Sightseeing,” a pitiful term that came into popular use at the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe the nascent trend of solely visiting places of major and acknowledged interest, has come to symbolize the travel industry as a whole, perhaps now better dubbed the "tourist trade," the willful understanding of a different culture and its people a distant concern. Are we just checking off a box? Our soft feet are fouling the hard soil of another land, offering the opportunity to imagine ourself in the shoes of those who have come before us, and, through imagination, attempt, however futile the ambition, to understand where we came from and all we do is perspective ourselves holding up the tower of Pisa?!

As a result, what we come home with are stacks of pictures that reflect static memories. And what reflects static memories creates static memories. Which hold us prisoner...

How about putting away the travel algorithm, shutting down the computer, shelving the guide book, and folding the map back up? Let us not trust, for a time at least, any form of curation, selection, or other editorial put upon our world by dubious tastemakers, and instead take our feet for a walk into the unknown...

That's what I was thinking that October morning and, instead of a blog post, I wrote this song, and enlisted some of the incredible musicians we met along the way to help us make it better than we could ever imagine...