From a Place Called Elsewhere
What happens when we give disruption our full undivided attention
The French call that feeling we experience whenever we are somewhere unfamiliar or even around the unfamiliar Le Dépaysement. Triggered by exposure to different cultures, lifestyles, languages, tastes and traditions, Le Dépaysement can be thrilling or unsettling. It can feel like freedom and curiosity or it can feel like estrangement and disorientation.
It is more than just wrestling with the new, unusual and unknown, however. It is actually registering the awareness that we have experienced a sense of displacement – literal or figurative – from an “elsewhere” place. A place that, in order for the sensation to strike at all, must exist away or removed from the typical habits, routines and surroundings of our everyday lives. Our “elsewheres” could be seven time-zones away or from a table inside that new restaurant just down the block.
Le Dépaysement is more all-encompassing than culture shock, exoticism or a change of scenery. While it thrives inside the tension that exists between commonplace and irregular, the jarring and jolting dichotomy is only the opening act. Once our automatic states or flows have been disrupted, Le Dépaysement next asks us to give this interruption our full, undivided attention.
This highly effective double-bill of disrupt and demand attention is how Le Dépaysement sets the conditions for noticing in motion. Noticing while in motion in turn creates the conditions for intentional travel, which, if embraced as a method of becoming, can transform what was once just escape and entertainment, into a laboratory of self-discovery.
Our willingness to move behind this lens, this more expansive point-of-view, with a heightened receptivity and awareness startles our hearts, minds and eyes open. Readying us to truly take in what is all around us.
I first became aware of the revelatory concept of Le Dépaysement this summer when The Art of French published a note that made it into my Substack feed. At first blush, the concept had energized me, activating something unresolved inside. Before I had the opportunity to research it further, I already felt as though I had discovered the organizing principle behind my philosophy and call to movement. I felt that much more settled as I considered how this French phenomenon outfitted me with the clarifying throughline I had been searching for ever since turning to travel to discover and live into my calling and purpose.
Le Dépaysement explained why travel, not stillness, was – my envelope, my container, my incubator – for self-discovery, creativity and meaning. It was why encounters, wonder and taste landed with such memorable force and impact when I was on the move, when I was called outside the boundaries of the ordinary, when I abandoned that predictable, comfortable state of homeostasis.
My heart’s first brush with Le Dépaysement was on a cross-country drive I took when I was a pre-teen with my family. We didn’t travel a lot when I was growing up: a few early trips to Hawaii, a disaster-plagued vacation in Florida, a series of long-weekend stays in state park lodges and the once-in-a-blue-moon big city excursion to St. Louis or Indianapolis.
My dad once drove us down to Tijuana from California where I first tried and subsequently fell madly in love with street tacos. But that was only after we filled up on milkshakes and cheeseburgers at the Hard Rock Café. A place that would go on to be my first all-consuming travel obsession. Take me anywhere, so long as I could get a Hard Rock t-shirt, I’d be happy. I suppose this was my first run-in with travel as consumption and checklist.
But more than anything, travel when I was young was the epitome of transaction. My parents divorced when I was seven years old. Twice a year, my younger sister and I would board a flight from Indianapolis, the closest legitimate airport to Paris, Illinois, our small midwestern town, and fly west to visit our father in Southern California.
Every year for ten years: once for spring break and once again for an eight-week extended stay in the summer, we would make the trek to and from. It was emotionally disruptive to leave parents and siblings on either side, and as I got older, excruciatingly inconvenient and socially debilitating to miss summers with friends.
I suppose I could have categorized movement as traumatic right then, but I have long suspected that I was simply born with this appetite, this sense of entitlement, to see and taste the world beyond where my feet were planted. It’s possible that I truly don’t know what to do with myself if I ever stop moving.
When we all piled into the dark green Pontiac van that summer for our trek across the United States, I didn’t know at the time how struck I would be by all the brands of idyllic that sprouted up in front of us, between vineyards, around mountain ranges and amidst cornfields. I was enchanted by the different topographies, vistas and sunsets that swept across these places, transforming them into the settings of movies, novels and daydreams.
No place registered with such lasting consequence as St. Helena, California. A picture-perfect oasis in a Napa Valley oasis that was already itself picturesque, St. Helena was the one place in this world my dad and I could agree was surely heaven on earth.
I have to imagine, seeing as he never made much of an effort to see the world, it remained his one-and-only forever spot until his death. Whereas I would go on in the 35 years after passing through St. Helena to continue searching for and collecting all of mine, believing that the world was simply too big and too majestic to hold just one. I’d add Panicale, Italy; Santorini, Greece; Hvar, Croatia; Sevilla, Spain; Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France; Waiheke Island, New Zealand; Franschhoek, South Africa…
Each catalogued and stored away like all those Hard Rock t-shirts.
I still remember coming up on St. Helena. As we approached it, it seemed to be cloaked in a golden glow. We slowed almost to a stop on Highway 29, the road that cuts through its small downtown, to take mental snapshots in between “oohs and ahhs” of every storefront, picket fence and rose bush. I’ve been back a number of times as an adult and it always stirs the same feelings of peace, nostalgia and awakening. Its universal beauty is one thing, but its grip on my soul is altogether another.
Our road trip would take us on to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Aspen, Colorado; and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Each of these destinations was being ingested then, without my ever realizing it, as catalysts or breadcrumbs. They were evidence that places of beauty and meaning root themselves deep inside of us: planting seeds, burying callbacks, laying down tracks for recovery and recollection.
Ever since my dad passed away, I avoid trips down memory lane with him. No detour is too out of the way, no shortcut too treacherous. Yet here I am in the backseat of that minivan, back in St. Helena with him at the wheel, watching on as he steers us through heaven on earth. I haven’t even left home and I’m mired in the unsettling but cathartic throes of Le Dépaysement.
But riding out, into and through all this uneasiness has given me an unexpected gift of perspective. I can trace, now, my love of travel back to that first drive through St. Helena. When the itch to travel was first scratched. Where foreign and unfamiliar first presented like an open-ended invitation to see and ask for more. Where the call to move could mean to discover and to explore, not leave behind or say goodbye to.
This is a sensation I have come to seek out on every trip I have taken thereafter. I found it anywhere and everywhere I have traveled with an open mind and heart. Soaking in the bright blue waters and chaos of Phuket, partaking in my first omakase in Tokyo, gazing out onto Paris from the highest hilltop in Montmartre, whale watching in Hermanus, South Africa. I have untangled it in Marrakech, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires and Ho Chi Minh City: cities that rattled or challenged me to the core, but beg me now to come back for another taste, another interpretation of us both.
This autumn, I plan to reconjure it in Vilnius, to encounter it alongside the shadows of Julia Child’s life in Provence and to rekindle it where it first and so clearly summoned me to move with meaning.
Where else, but my very first “elsewhere.”
Heaven on earth, St. Helena.
Our forever spot.
An oasis of Le Dépaysement.
