Every Journey Is a Pilgrimage (Part 2)

August 14, 2010 in Travel by CL

The Real Journey

Looking back, I realize that I was refining my practice of vulnerability, a practice as rigorous and soul-scouring as any contemplative art. Becoming vulnerable requires concentration, devotion, and a leap of faith—the ability to abandon yourself to a forbiddingly foreign place and say, in effect, “Here I am; do with me what you will.” It’s the first step on the pilgrim’s path.

The second step is absorbing a lesson that grows from the first: The more you humble yourself, the greater you become. I have felt this in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, imagining the ceaseless processions of worshippers who had come before me and would come after. I have felt it in the main train station in Calcutta, adrift in a sweaty, sharp-elbowed, eternally jostling, cardamom-scented sea of humanity. I have felt it walking alone on the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan, between towering peaks so ancient and enormous that I felt smaller than the tiniest grain of sand. Travel teaches us how small we are—when we truly understand this, the world expands infinitely. In that moment, we become part of the larger whole; we lose ourselves to the Parisian stone, the Indian crowd, the Himalayan crags.

This truth has led me over the years to a third illumination: Every journey takes us inward as well as outward. As we move through new places, encountering new people and food and artistic creations, new languages and customs and histories, a corresponding journey winds within as we discover new morals, meanings, and imaginings. The real journey is the ongoing and ever-changing interaction of the inner life and the outer.

When we travel, we connect the external world with the one inside. On the best trips, these connections can become so complete that a kind of samadhi (union) is achieved: We transcend not just the barriers of language, custom, geography, and age but the very barriers of self, those illusory isolations of body and mind.

These moments do not last. We exit Notre-Dame, buy our ticket in Calcutta, climb back into our minivan in the Himalayas. But we come back from those moments—like the Japanese pilgrim I met—lighter and energized, with a refreshed sense of the meaning of life.

What I relearned on my circuit of Shikoku is that every journey is a pilgrimage. Every sojourn offers the chance to connect with a sacred secret: that we are all precious pieces of a vast and interconnected puzzle, and that every trip we take, every connection we make, helps complete that puzzle—and ourselves.

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