When you’ve been fortunate to travel far and wide, you meet all sorts of fellow travellers. Some are collecting physical memories – pictures for the wall or Facebook, art for the admiring, knickknacks. Some are collecting experiences – been there, tasted this, saw that. Some lean into the cultural differences, and feel the stark divide of wealth and opportunity. Others open themselves to the new and feel their mind broadening, even at times disorientating so. And some – maybe most of us – do, or have done, a little of all the above.

I was thinking about this last week when discussing the spiritual practices that encourage the development of compassion. One of those is travel. Even if that travel is just along the road, or past those divides in cities between one class and another, one culture and another.

But not all travel results in the traveller being more empathetic. Some travellers seem to filter everything through their existing prejudices and come home with them largely intact. Travel hasn’t broadened the mind; it has reinforced the fences.

I remember years ago in Niger being amazed when a kiwi I knew scoffed at the English language skills of a local. The local could hold a conversation in his tribal language, Hausa (the official indigenous language), French (the primary colonial language), and, albeit haltingly, in English. The kiwi reckoned the ability to speak English was the benchmark of intelligence, and I saw the kiwi’s reckoning as the opposite. I haven’t seen this fellow since, but I doubt travel did much to change him for the better.

Travel is journeying and returning. In spiritual literature, journey refers to not just a physical expedition but a process of discovery, of deep listening, of engagement with difference and the challenge of differences, and of personal change.

The returning is often called coming home. And in spiritual literature ‘coming home’ refers to finding your true self, your identity, not as an autonomous being but as an interconnected one, and where the heart is as much a compass for your actions as your mind.

Recently I wrote this blessing for a traveller:

May you be blessed on your journey.

May your way be strewn with serendipitous surprises.

May your soles feel the earth and hear its stories.

May you meet a great variety of people and listen with the ears of your heart.

May you be changed by what you experience –  

stretching your mind,

softening your centre,

shaping the way you see the world.

And may you find your way home to what matters most.

Glynn

(Image: inside Sagrada Familia, Barcelona)