Go Away ... aka A Travel Law, Continued
(Post 2 in a series, probably of 3)
There's an old fable about a vegetable, eggs, and coffee. Sometimes the veggies are potatoes, sometimes carrots, sometimes green beans. It's an adversity tale, shrouded in narrative, wherein hot water is introduced to each of the three things (veg, egg, coffee), and thermodynamics alters states: the veg becomes soft, the egg becomes hard, and the coffee becomes transcendent. And the morale of the story is revealed -- “When adversity arrives, what is your response? Are you (most like) the vegetable, the egg, or the coffee?"
AirB&B's "First Law of Travel" pulled that fable to mind, with its "you have to get lost to be found" message, a conventionally-wise reminder about travel/challenges telling us who we are, since ostensibly adversity is the "fuel of greatness" and innovation and purportedly many positive things. The law, per the ad, summarily asserts (see my previous post for the complete narrative):
... Travel reminds you ... every moment that you’re not on top of things.
The point of travel is to take a plunge, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear ... when you’re lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, you find out who you are.
Transformation comes when ... not in charge.
The first law of travel and therefore of life: you are only as strong as your readiness to surrender.
If we are to believe the First Law of Travel, and its Veg/Egg/Coffee corollary, then adversity must prove a tonic (not turmoil) and accelerant for at least the rare Coffee Bean superstars among us. The veggies and eggs can just hit the trash can, I suppose.
First, some basic sanity hammers.
Pull a potato from the ground, an egg from the nest, and immediately place them in boiling water, and after a sufficient amount of time, this narrative holds. One gets soft, one gets hardened; check, check.
Pull coffee beans from a bush and put them in boiling water, and it very much does not hold. Reality and logic must be suspended to make the coffee piece work -- as the coffee endured at least a couple different preparatory forces to convert them from beans on the plant to grounds that can be worked upon by the water. Let's pop those bits back in, and now the story isn't so instructive. Those missing parts of the supply chain story are desperately necessary. The beans had already met heat once before, by roasting, and then those same beans had to be thrashed, almost pulverized to dust, to make them permeable to the hot water at all. Youch! What previous adversity must occur before one is truly grounds (what an image) upon which adversity can work magic and not just trauma? Before traveling snafus are a balm and not a burden?
The Travel Law starts to pull apart from its seams right at the get-go for me: adversity (aka travel in this ad) is like getting lost (or experiencing fear, natch), but that is no quick fix for finding oneself or perhaps anything else ... because getting lost-n-found might actually require some other previously-installed circumstances to work out well -- like knowing the local language, or being healthy and not sick, or having some currency in the pocket. How about just good old fashioned luck?
For vacations, the best are often the least eventful, the most restful, not ones full of adversity that test our character and transformational ability and strength. Don't we have normal non-vacation life for plenty of that? How battered does one have to be by Life (pre-roasted! pre-ground!) in order to be transformed by adversity, aka "an uncertain trip someplace unknown," a trip that will put you "not in charge" and worse ... "ready to surrender"!
This ad appears perfect for the daft, slick modern age! Because those beans aren't gonna brew themselves! But let's not talk about how the coffee actually gets receptive to hot water, let's just talk about the tasty brown water it ends up as, shall we? Ah, the magic of the modern marketplace, operative word being "magic."
Second, there's the really sticky bit in the First Law of Travel about "transformation coming when one is not in charge." So lyrical and poetic! Yet so empirically false in any consistent sense. Almost the entirety of our lives is conducted when we are very much not in charge -- drudgery-filled, with illness and debt and disappointments; there is precious little of which the human animal is trulyin charge.
We have some semblance of control over health (e.g., diet, fitness) but not genetics, over attitude but not environments. Ponder examples of amazing transformational achievements, from massive weight loss (human in charge) to career changes (human in charge) to athletic excellence (human in charge). Transformation occurs more often when one is both in charge and motivated to be in charge. No fate but what we make, n'est pas? Travel accidents not withstanding.
And the final "I seriously doubt the veracity" point: you’re only as strong as your readiness to surrender. Pardon me while I cough "bullshit" in my lightly-closed fist.
At first, this was the only compelling part of the narrative for me, because it's fairly true from a Buddhist "radical acceptance" point of view, a la the proverbial tree that bends but does not break. But without a definition of terms -- as in, what exactly is meant by the words "strength" and "surrender" -- it's again observably false that surrendering while traveling is some indication of strength.
- Losing one's luggage and sanguinely surrendering to buying more clothing is certainly evidence of a character trait (and maybe the means to front the cost until the airline reimburses) but is that a transformational travel event?
- Does the failure of a car's GPS on a solo-female trip in remote parts of Greece, when one doesn't read Greek or have English maps, present a transformational opportunity? Perhaps, but it took years for me to process that harrowing experience, and all it did in the moment was curtail my countryside exploration. And it made me a more paranoid traveler, which was not what most would term an improvement.
- Does missing the last bus out of Sienna back to Florence provide surrender-worthy events? Maybe once we started freezing in the wee hours of the night and the metal park benches were too cold, so we tried door handles of cars and huddled on church stoops and eventually laid down under alfresco tables on a closed restaurant's patio. I was transformed into a potentially hypothermic trespasser, desperate to lay down and be warm. One star out of 10, do not recommend, would not do again.
- Does a nation-wide, week-long blackout on the first night of my Puero Rican vacation create transformational and surrender-strength-building events? Nope. It caused businesses to close and cancel excursions, traffic-lights-out government shutdowns. We paid $4000 to sleep in sweaty darkness, eat in dim heat, slick without break for a week, and eventually went without showers or water of any kind once the AirB&B's building generator failed on Day 3. After we returned home it seemed to take two weeks to recover from the lost sleep and borderline dehydration.
As of this last travel fiasco, I'm not ready to travel again for quite a while.
So maybe I'm an egg not coffee.
Increasingly, science has proven out some parts of the hot water/adversity narratives: stress (in moderation) can be beneficial. Maybe it's sufficient to agree: when the plane is delayed, one does better to just accept it and not rage against the machine. Is this transformational?
It is quaint, this advertisement meant to entice you to travel so you can Find and Transform Yourself, and pay AirB&B whilst you do it, but make no mistake: you will need to be roasted and ground first. You must afford the trip, have made accommodation reservations (unless you like sleeping on benches or sidewalks) including those too-often-extra-hidden AirB&B fees, and have funds to at least be able to purchase fresh water ... because when the power goes out -- the faucets will not work, and if they do, it damned sure will not be warm. Please note: a person can survive without water for about three days.
Herein endeth the real Travel Law lesson.
Image Source: https://printawallpaper.com/shop/global-travel/