What is it that sends a tingle through your body when you look upon Victoria Falls or the Grand Canyon? I’ve come to think about travel experiences as food for the soul. But I suppose I have only taken a circuitous path to the obvious.
P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian mathematician, wrote a memoir that described his travel experiences with a Caucasian mystic named Georges Gurdjieff. It was called In Search of the Miraculous and was a fascinating glimpse into a non-Western mind.
One of Gurdjieff’s many fascinating ideas that set me to pondering was that there are three kinds of food. There is what we normally refer to as food, things we ingest, such as cheeseburgers, pizza, etc. You can survive a few weeks without food, even less time without water. Eventually you need food to sustain life.
The second kind of food, he said, is air, your breath. You can only go a few minutes without air. It’s more vital, and also more ethereal. It’s another order of matter.
But the third kind of food he spoke of consists of your impressions. Without your sensory impressions, he said, you would die instantly. According to Gurdjieff, your senses connect you to the engine of the universe. Your eyes, ears, touch, movement, all your senses, named and unnamed, transmit energy to you in many forms.
He said, “The flow of impressions coming to us from outside is like a driving belt communicating motion to us. The principal motor for us is nature, the surrounding world. Nature transmits to us through our impressions the energy by which we live and move and have our being. If the inflow of this energy is arrested our machine will immediately stop working.”
When I first read this, it struck me as odd, certainly. I’d never thought of anything that way. But at the same time, it made sense. It didn’t fall apart under closer examination. On the contrary, the idea that your sensory impressions are a kind of nourishment seemed not so far-fetched.
If you think of it that way, it presents a kind of a hierarchy of the energies that are the driving forces of life, from gross to fine. The physical food we consume provides the basic energy to maintain the physical body, the machine. The breath transmits a higher frequency of energy, and nourishes us in a different way.
The sensory impressions are yet a higher order of energy, a finer frequency. It includes energy as information. It is nonphysical, but transmits energy to your mind and spirit that can ignite physical energy in the body.
The range of information you receive through your senses is infinite. All of the things we see, hear and feel bring energy from the outside world. Each person has a unique point of view. To paraphrase composer John Cage, the show is everywhere, and everyone is in the best seat.
It’s not all the same, however. Some things bring finer forms of energy than others. When you go into a museum and see a painting and you are moved, what has that painting transmitted to you? What has it told you? How has it expanded or enriched you? How might it have changed your point of view or your understanding of something? Maybe it only gave you a wave of happiness and appreciation. All these impressions are a kind of food for the soul.
What do you receive when you look at another person? People watching is still one of the best travel activities. Every face tells a story, as does every word, every gesture, every article of clothing. How much information is conveyed by a facial expression? Researchers have shown that human beings perceive the human face with far more precision and detail than any other thing.
There are different qualities of experience. Much of the repetitive routine of daily life makes no lasting impression and is forgotten. But there are some moments you will remember vividly all your life. Those extraordinary experiences happen more often when we travel and plunge into a new environment.
Those special experiences become a part of you, a part of who you are, how you have grown, and what you have learned. The special experiences, the “memorable” moments, not the repetitive run-of-the-mill moments, remain within you. The most extraordinary moments leave vivid memories. To me those memories are like little rooms in my mind that I can always return to and enjoy again, and maybe bring some enjoyment to someone else by sharing the experience.
As a dedicated traveler, I’ve been privileged to experience a wide range of experiences. To have perceived all the things I have been fortunate to observe in my travels does indeed feel like food for the soul, nourishment on the most profound levels of my being. And it’s a kind of food that can give me nourishment again years after the fact. It’s an energy that transcends barriers of time and space.
The impressions that last, that “leave an impression” on you, solidify in you as memories. And we can feed on those for the rest of our lives.
I feel profoundly enriched by the precious travel experiences that can be called forth from memory by any random association. They may be triggered by something in conversation or something that I see or read. Some impression today might bring back one of those memories. It’s great to be able to relive them in memory
Travel experiences that are now built into the fiber of my being, are some of the most valuable things I will ever possess. They certainly have much more lasting value than all of my material possessions.
Next to the love between myself and my loved ones, my travel experiences rank at the top of my personal hierarchy of values.
I do believe these things. Travel is good for the soul.
All the best,
A. Colin Treadwell