Travel to Engage!

I love the way travel gathers you inexorably into the moment. All the prepping draws you into the present moment before you - determining dates, means, itineraries, packing, winding up loose ends, paying bills, stocking the home for those left behind. I invariably blitz my closets - a potential consolation to the family should I not return (equally it could be for fear of having them experience wave after wave of horror or exasperation as they go through all my stuff to dispose of it!).

Travel relieves you of the illusion of the permanence of your 'life'. You step out of your routine and imagined indispensability and lo and behold! Things don't fall apart! Groceries are bought. Your family still eats. Maybe they too feel liberated!

I absolutely love travelling, especially on my own  (an infrequent if not rare event). More than the release from Domestos and other commitments, its the sudden anonymity I feel graced with that sends my endorphins soaring. Having left everything in as best a shape as I can, and delegated all my responsibilities to others and ultimately placed it all in God's hands, I feel free and baggage-less. It helps to travel light, it has to be said. I have made it a rule not to take any luggage which I cannot carry easily myself. Impose as little as possible. No one knows me, no one has expectations of me. All I have to make my way through the world is a ticket and my conduct.

All the journeys we take are allegories of the greater journey we take through existence. Its so delicious to experience these compressed arcs of time, for each trip mirrors birth, life and death. The start, duration and end of any journey is full of significance and meaning, made all the more real by the absence of routine dulling our sensory perceptions. In fact, senses are sharpened as our lives hang in the balance: will we make it or not? There is always that possibility and it is felt all the more keenly in an airborne or water borne vessel.

Unlike many who grumble about airports, hotels and flights, I actually relish them. Most of them: I confess to excluding Dubai from this list for reasons obvious to those who have had to run the gauntlet of the giant hellish cigar it has become. And the labyrinthine Heathrow. It may be that being in a plane or in an airport simply presages the delights of the journey that lie further ahead. It may be the cloak of invisibility it drapes over you as you become a mere number. Or it may be the impermanence of your experience of all these elements of movement.The process of travel divests you of the accoutrements of bourgeois urban life. However you weigh it, you feel stripped and weightless, free to just be. 

There's another more practical aspect of travel, which is growing from the knowledge it brings. In Muslim civilization it was common for Muslims to embark on a rihla or journey, for the sake of acquiring knowledge, imparting it, and altogether as another form of worship, for Allah exhorts us to travel in His lands to seek His bounty and to witness the ends of other civilizations. In the early centuries of Islam it was common for scholars to travel to the major cities of Islam (Kufa, Damascus, Baghdad, Madinah) to gain the direct transmission of ahadith, or sayings of the Prophet (S). It is not widely know that women also participated in this endeavour, usually accompanied by a father or brother. Women not only taught other women but also other men. By some calculations almost a quarter of these accounts were gathered by women. Gradually, however, as the egalitarian spirit of Islam was strangled by cultural practises of existing civilizations and the transforming social landscape, the participation of women in this process started to fade so that by the 16th century women's names had disappeared from the biographical volumes of transmitters of hadith.

But I digress - happily so.

Any journey sets off a cascade of travels and arrivals, journeys within journeys. Time telescopes. The fields of time and space are warped to expand and with that the sense of self is altered, refreshed, revived. You can even redefine yourself. And even as the destination beckons, the present moment is all. Awareness of where you are in relation to your environment moves to hyper drive. Senses are on warp speed alert. You feel alive! You have responded to the Picardian* command: 'Engage!'

*Jean Luc Picard, Captain of USS Enterprise. Star Trek: New Generation.