Thursday 28 July 2011

Rule 10: Travelling outside and inside

East, West, South or North makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.

Recently, I read about a taxi driver in the Gaza strip. He is living in this area of 360 square kilometers with 1,5 million people. His last trip out of Gaza was 30 years ago. Chances that he could leave his territory in some time in future are close to zero. Maybe you can feel compassion when being allowed to live in a country in which everything is open to venture in any direction, with a passport which opens all borders and a credit card which opens all doors. And on the other side of this, billions of people who have even less chances in their lives and even less freedom to move as this taxi driver.

It is part of what we are that we love change in space, exploration of the dimensions and directions, travelling. We want to meet the horizon and find a new horizon there which again tempts us to move over it. Still, travelling meets a border at some point, the border of space. There is a new border behind the one we have just conquered. By travelling, we want to escape this limitation but this is not possible on the outside as it is part of our nature, of being physical. We never reach the south when we want to go south because there is always a more southerly south, and even when we arrive at the poles in which all directions fall into one, we have not arrived, even there we want to move on.

Travelling wakes our curiosity and our urge to expand. It is part of our emancipator consciousness. This form of consciousness wants to make a difference to all that has already existed, it wants to change and to escape any form of stability. It wants to relinquish the common places and the boredoms of daily life and to find adventures which give challenge and inspiration. It is the energy which entices the son or the daughter to leave the safe parental haven and to go out into the wide world in order to come back some day, changed and mature.

Yet travelling in the world of space will inevitably meet the dilemma of this level of consciousness: Any urge for something new gets boring and monotonous in itself. So we look for new ways of travelling and new place where no one has ever been before. But we cannot get away from the dilemma as we have never really found what we were looking for, as the new experience is old already on the next day, even in the next moment. So our emancipative drive urges us on and does not let us rest – the promised land, Shangrila, Avalon must be anywhere in this universe, the place where every longing comes to rest and the search and seeking has found what it aimed at.

This silence cannot be found in the three dimensional space or in the four directions but only in our inside. When we enter deeper into that space we find the doorways to the spaciousness and infinity of being. And here we discover that what makes travelling so interesting to us is the changes which happen inside. Of course we enjoy all the impressions from outside, but deep inside it is the opening in ourselves which gives us happiness. So any outer travel is an inner travel. Any change of place causes an inner change of perspective.

And when the inner worlds open up their fascinating aspects the urge to change on the outside can lessen. Then there is no need for every vacation to increase the ecological footprint so far that it is impossible to balance. Then we can allow even small or less spectacular changes of places can enfold their precious inner pleasures.


The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com

No comments:

Post a Comment