02 : Finding Stillness in Transit

Two Travellers. One Conversation. Different lessons learned on the road.

“You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.” - Paul Theroux

Hello there, welcome to an on-the-run series about TRAVEL. A series of reflections on what long-term-travel looks like beneath the shiny packaging and distant dreaming. A series hosted by Jay Ventress otherwise known as Jaytheauthor (Author and street artist) and Matthew David Nelson (Travel photographer and writer) reflecting on the good, the bad, the ugly, and all the blood, guts, and lightning bolts travellers often encounter on the misty road that never clears.

In discussing the strange trails they've each come to embrace as home, Matt and Jay realized they've stumbled upon similar universal truths on the road. This series is to ask questions that go beneath the average travellers skin, to try to decipher the destination in their minds and why they can’t stop moving.

All Photos are collaborations between the two authors

Jay to Matt: Do you find the longer you travel the harder it is to stay still in one place?

“It was time to go home. Time to complete the circle. Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood.” Carl Hoffman – The Lunatic Express

I think it’s all a spectrum. When I was settled and comfortable at home for so long, I yearned for the other extreme of freedom and movement.

Now I think I’m reaching the point where travel has started to have diminishing returns. It was necessary at one time to shake me out of my assumptions and habits and open me up to new paths, but I think I hit the limit of how much of that I truly need. Now, I feel this need to root down somewhere, and stop traveling. I want to have more depth of connection and experience to the place and people around me.

Just yesterday, a travel writer friend told me she hadn’t traveled for over a year, and she expected I would be so disappointed in her, but she was shocked at how I was so jealous. It sounds so beautiful, to be settled firmly somewhere, and be able to watch the seasons change, knowing a whole world is out there yet not feeling an urge to go back out into it (for a time). I think long periods of residence can allow you to explore the depths of yourself even more. And then the next time you do choose to travel again, it’s like experiencing it anew.

I think my problem is that I am indecisive about committing to one place I will settle down. Perhaps it’s a fear of commitment. I’ll get somewhere, start to settle in, and make connections, but then an offer to do a project, or visit a friend elsewhere comes in, and I feel the urge to pursue it. I’m fully conscious of the fact that settling down is what I want to do, yet find myself still wanting to take one more trip, have one last adventure.

JAY: I totally feel you about the ‘one last hit’ motion. I believe travellers and heroin addicts are more alike than people think, both chasing that next escape, that ‘one more hit’ to take them further from reality. It’s funny how travel gets marketed to the masses: Quit your job. Travel the world. Go find yourself. That overplayed mantra is deadlier than a pack of smokes.

For one, it’s a lie. At least for me. The more I travel, the more I realize I’m not finding myself, I’m losing myself. Each place strips away another layer, leaving me more uncertain about who I was or who I’m supposed to be. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the beauty of travel isn’t in “finding yourself”; it’s in learning to let go. Teaching you to shed your past self, like a snake shedding its skin through the seasons. 

And then there’s the brutal side. Quitting your job to go find yourself takes guts, but it doesn’t always work out for the best. I’ve seen the travel bug devour more than a few energetic eyes. If you’re not careful, travel can delude you. Spend more than a year outside the ‘normal 9-to-5 world,’ and it becomes difficult to remember how to tune back into the frequency. And because of the nature of the travel beast, most of us do have to tune back in eventually, if we want to keep taking our next hit. Yet, much like a junkie, we become dependent on the fix. We need to go somewhere. Our feet burn the same way an addict’s skin itches. And so, we find a way to chase the next escape.

Unfortunately, not everyone finds that hit. Some lose their ability to tune back into the real world entirely. Their antenna breaks somewhere along the way, leaving them unable to connect to reality. You’d be surprised how many people living rough on the streets were once young vagabonds with bright, energetic eyes. It’s heartbreaking to see dreamers beaten down for believing in their dreams. But that’s the sad truth of this world: step out of society for too long, and while you might not forget it, society will forget you.

This whole “Quit your job. Travel the world. Go find yourself.” mantra is more dangerous than people realize. Sure, it can be beautiful, breathtaking, and life-changing. But if you treat it as a recipe for guaranteed spiritual success, it can be deadly.

Matt: I know what you mean. I’ve seen what I suspect are veterans of the 1970’s Hippie Trail still wandering the alleys of Kathmandu and Casablanca, and I guess that’s what can happen when you take travel too far.

I feel the key to keeping long-term travel sustainable is having some sort of grounding or spiritual practice - maintaining stillness and a sense of balance while on the road.

While wandering the Nepali Himalayas three years ago, I kept bumping into other travelers who would talk about their transformative experiences with Vipassana (“insight”/”seeing things as they truly are”) meditation. I was intrigued and figured it was the universe’s way of telling me this was important, and as I had never seriously attempted meditation before, I figured it was best to just take the cold plunge of ten days of forced silent meditation.

As you know very well, that means no speaking, no devices, no reading or writing allowed; just sitting in silent, guided meditation for ten hours every day, from 430 AM onward.

The meditation center was situated in full view of the other-worldly Annapurna range - 7’000 meter-plus peaks, and coincidentally overlooked the very same lake I had almost drowned in two years before.

Because it was January in the jungle, the earthen walls of our shack-like dorms couldn’t keep out moisture. So we would tuck ourselves into damp bedding every night.

Staying silent, and locking away my phone was really no issue for me. I loved the silence, and watching the sun rise over the Annapurnas as plates clattered in the dining hall each morning was damn near rapturous.

The meditation itself was the excruciating part of it, but I look back on those silent days with so much love, and the weirdest memories come flooding back.

I can still hear the smacking sounds of the Nepali dude who would eat next to me in the dining hall, as if he was trying to make his chewing heard from the summit of Annapurna itself. But the sensory deprivation and monk-like discipline allowed me to reach states where I was traveling within myself, and experiencing profound sensations that are hard to put into words. But I came away feeling lighter, like all traces of anxiety had been wrung from my mind.

The experience ended what felt like a distinct chapter of my travels, and I knew I needed to head back home immediately after wrapping up the course. But I came away no longer a skeptic about meditation and “energy”, and a lot of things I had thought were kinda completely wu-wu until that point.

It’s still difficult as hell to practice, and I’m still very much a beginner, but I feel like it’s something that will help balance out the peaks and troughs that come with long-term travel.

JAY: Mate, what a coincidence that we both did the Vipassana! That meditation course is brutal. I can’t imagine how incredible it must’ve been to do it in the Nepalese mountains, your spirit is already on a higher plane before you even start. I did my Vipassana experience in Tasmania, Australia. A little cabin in the woods. Honestly, the place looked more like a cult camp than a meditation retreat, but it absolutely obliterated my mind. It’s crazy how powerful doing nothing is. As you know, the whole point of meditation is to let things exist as they are, to not crave or cower from pain or pleasure, to just exist. And what your body and mind can do in that state is indescribable.

I’d never meditated before Vipassana. I ended up there by accident because my girlfriend said it would be a “fun and cheap experience.” At the time, I was broke, so I figured, why not? But I wouldn’t call it fun. It was an experience, sure, but fun? No. People don’t realize how painful it is to sit cross-legged for ten hours a day. Some weird shit happened over those ten days.

One of the strangest things was how in tune I became with the forest. Once your body adjusts to the stillness and silence, strange things start happening. One guy in the course befriended a snake. I befriended a bee. It would land on my finger whenever we left the meditation hall, joining me in whatever dumb little activity I invented to keep my brain occupied. I called him Mr. Bee.

At the start, I wasn’t taking anything seriously at all. I was bored out of my mind. I remember trying to see how many times I could walk around a tree before throwing up. I got caught and told off because apparently, it was distracting people. Around day five or six, hell opened up in my head, and all the skeletons I’d been shoving into the darkest closets of my mind came crawling out. I went completely insane for a couple of days. At one point, I wanted to rip off all my clothes, crawl out of the meditation hall into the forest, and eat spiders.

I wasn’t the only one losing it though. A guy sitting near me had a full-blown breakdown. His was external, mine erupted inside. The only thing that kept me sane was the pen I snuck in my underwear. Because you’re not supposed to read or write for ten days, I would sneak into the toilet at night to steal a roll and write down all the places I visited inside my head. I still have the seventy feet worth of writings on various scraps of toilet paper.

By day seven or eight, I eventually accepted all the monsters living inside my head and learned to live with them and even appreciate them. I think the biggest thing I gained from this experience was to accept that it’s healthy to have both demons and angels within you. If you only have one spirit free inside of you, then you will either be taken advantage of or you might become a serial killer. I’m not sure if this realization is what you’re supposed to gain from this experience, but this is what I walked away with. The confidence to bite at people who try to take advantage of your kind hand. Vipassana! taught me, “There’s a difference between someone who is nice and kind.” It taught me how to respect myself and to stop people from fucking you.

Thank you for taking the time to sit with us and talk about travel. This conversation is the first of many episodes with regards to travel, philosophy, and whatever lives in-between those two worlds. If you would like to join us for the next conversation, feel free to subscribe, and if you want to follow our personal adventures around the world, you can find Matt and Jay on Instagram.

Much love and fire speed wild child. - Jay and Matt