The Contract We Sign When We Choose to See the World
A birthday reflection on what travel asks of us when the world needs it most.
Dove Banksy Mural on The Wall, captured on a 2021 Trip to Israel
Just like some places from our travels will hold a piece of us, others will leave a mark, glaze us with the kind of texture and patina only transformative travel can apply. This residue, beyond being evidence that travel has touched and shaped us, is a lasting gift and inextinguishable reservoir.
All at once this residue feels like a lens from which to see fresh perspective and potential, a filter from which to process the deafening noise and mundanity of everyday life, and an armor from which to protect forming passion and purpose.
By design, it is malleable and resilient.
The cloak of travel’s residue is meant to spotlight not veil the wonders and possibilities unfolding near and far in the world around us. If we choose to don it with awareness and intent, we will move inside of its shelter for the rest of our lives. We will sit in stillness with it. And we will fail, grow and flourish beneath it.
Some days, when hurt and hate swarm the places we’ve visited and devastate the lives of the people we’ve met, the cloak will feel too heavy. We will watch helplessly on as needless hurt and hate threaten the shared humanity travel all but proves unites us. All of us – Iranian, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli, Muslim, Jew, Christian, American.
So how is it that some people travel and resist, discover and forget, follow and forsake?
Hurt and hate?
Travelers can no longer afford for these questions to be rhetorical. We can no longer afford to let them sit unanswered.
When today’s Tessera 57 drops, I’ll have officially albeit reluctantly stepped into my 47th year. That’s an incredibly awkward and evasive way of saying today is my birthday and I’m turning forty-seven (47!).
I intentionally designed my content calendar to take me on a journey of reflection and reverie in the weeks leading up to and coming down from this mile marker. Writing felt like the best way to diffuse and properly celebrate another year, to acknowledge what I’ve steered myself around and toward and to express gratitude for where life’s carried me.
I was born at 5pm on the nose, Pacific Daylight Saving Time, just in time for happy hour. I considered turning back the clock to revisit some of my favorite bars and cocktails around the world. But my agitated heart and anxious fingertips don’t want to talk Negronis, Amaro and Vermouth. They want to strike the keys that matter.
Bites and sips, chef’s counters, and artisan workshops and boutiques, the tropes of travel I have turned to over and over in my writings, simply have no place in this conversation about travel’s transformative power.
Amongst all the gifts that travel has bestowed upon us, I long most for an antidote for the otherness, disinformation and discrimination swelling and spreading like a plague.
When we choose to travel we naturally opt in to expand, not close ourselves off. We elect to connect and absorb, not conveniently consume and then abandon. We identify as a citizen not of our zip code but of this world.
We can’t walk back exposure to new and different and we shouldn’t want to. We should want to taste even more.
When we sign up to see the world, we sign an unofficial contract. We trade in blind eyes and deaf ears for vision and empathy, for community and inclusivity, for the promise of real and lasting peace.
Travel is a walking through, not a stopping at. It doesn’t work with closed-off borders, moats, gates and walls. Why, why on earth, should life be any different?
Just as travel surprises and delights us, it will compel us. It should compel us. Through the experiences we come to have and the people we cross paths with, travel will ask us to move more magnanimously, more determinedly against attitudes and falsely patriotic platitudes that make the world feel more diced up and divided than it really is.
Underneath layers of brash headlines, sit the real stories, stories of everyday people who have so much more in common with each other than the boundaries we draw between countries and continents capture. Travel opens our eyes to this connection, to this ever so critical sense of belonging.
Travel also teaches us to be wary of any discourse and dialogue that seeks to force a wedge with generalization instead of build a bridge with shared longing and experience.
Somewhere along the way, we let bitterness and entitlement push out good old-fashioned love for our neighbor and equality.
Equality.
What is so off-putting about equality, equal access, and freedom?
I’m struck again and again through travel to places as bountiful and beautiful as Vietnam, Croatia and Israel – how this word wrecks worlds. And I don’t even have to leave home to see what it’s done to my own.
Just as we shouldn’t deplete our planet’s resources without expecting scientifically proven blowback, we shouldn’t draw only joy and indulgence from travel’s benevolent well. We shouldn’t take and not give.
There is a balance and an order of things. Travel moves me most when it calls upon me to move alongside it. I am better for travel insisting I recalibrate worn-out points of view, stretch a fixed mindset, try new things.
To show up at the doorstep of the world with a closed-off mind and heart is a sickening sin of arrogance and a depressing waste of opportunity.
Travel is a gift, but it is also an obligation that we should proudly and readily accept – to give back. To pay forward. To bear witness. To stand up – and rebuke all that threatens the world, the place we ALL call home.
From ground-zero of forty-seven years, I’ve never felt more heartbroken for the state of the world around me and yet so thoroughly captivated by its beauty, kindness and love.
I find myself called back to the days when travel’s dazzling burnish fit more like a magic cape than a cloak of doom. Those were the days when the Negronis hit the spot and taste led me to tables set with flavor, calling and purposeful collision.
On those days travel made us feel like we can battle anything: inertia, restlessness, burnout, heartbreak, disenchantment.
Even hurt and hate.
Especially hurt and hate.
With one single wish, a birthday candle will softly get blown out tonight. I will wish then, as I plead now, “May there be peace on this earth and throughout the entire universe.”
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
