Traveling Light
Resil B. Mojares
Seasoned travelers have learned the art of traveling light. While others weigh themselves down with a ton of luggage, spend inordinate amounts of time packing, endlessly worrying about items forgotten, lost, or mislaid - the seasoned traveler moves through places lightly, unencumbered.
There is something to be said for the art of traveling light. This is a simple economy. Arriving by train on my first visit to New York, I did not have to take a taxi from Union Square to my hotel. I walked. Transiting in Rome for a few days, I checked my suitcase in a luggage depository in the airport (after I had transferred a few necessities into a light traveling bag), took the bus to the heart of Rome, and was quickly off to a walking tour of the city.
These may seem like a glamorization of penny-pinching, but he who travels light does get to explore and see more. On a whim, he can interrupt his travels, get off a bus, check his bag into a locker, and then roam town or city for a few hours before resuming his trip.
Traveling light is more than just a question of luggage. It also means traveling anonymously and alone. It means not having a fixed intinerary to follow, appointments to keep, traveling companions to drag you down, or hosts who plan for you things to do that you do quite relish doing. You travel as you are, free to seek out your own interest or follow your instincts. Now, this too can be a rather lonely (even selfish) enterprise. Yet in an important sense, there is essential solitariness to travel. It is always a personal experience: it cannot be done by a proxy, and while it can be shared (and joyously shared), what is sheared cannot be quite the same.
Traveling light is an eloquent metaphor. After all, whether or not we leave our home city, we are travelers all. It is not just places but time, life, which we transverse. To travel light is a greater virtue that it seems. Imelda Marcos' mountain of lug does not only say something about Imelda as world-traveler bit also Imelda as a person. It is not just luggage we are prone to carry in excess.
Imelda Marcos is not alone. Egypt's King Farouk ate 600 oysters a week. Farouk's grandfather, Khedive Ismail, kept a harem of 300 women and, in 1895 died while trying to guzzle two bottles of champagne in on a draft. It is strange how people can find pleasure in such gross rebundancies. Yet, the 2,700 pairs of shoes, 600 oysters, and 300 women are a metaphor (rather overdrawn, I must admit) for what we - in humble though not necessarily honest ways - burden ourselves with.
We weigh ourselves down with many things. Some of us, like a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel, carry the carcass of the past around our necks, unable to distinguish between memories we must hold close to the heart and those we need to shed off. We move slowly, as in a bog, On the other hand, there are those who seem so caught up in motion, they have no time for memory beyond remembering the facts they need from moving from day to day. Yet, though they may be in perpetual locomotion, they may not be traveling at all. I recall from a friend who seemed always in between places, just arrived from somewhere, going off to meet someone, or rushing off to catch a plane. Yet, it seemed to me, the energy he put into moving was mainly disguise for the fact he was, in life, not getting anywhere. He carried a single suitcase but traveled with excess baggage - the kind you cannot check in.
There are others of a more numerous variety, and if a decidedly less romantic mold, who lug with them things more vain and mundane - degrees, titles, honors, undigested knowledge, petty accumulations of worldly goods (from cars and clothes to bathtub and kitchen sink), and the weight of their self-importance. Though they carry heavily-marked passports, they have crossed few boarders. Beside them, Conrad's star-crossed anti-hero seems infinitely more appealing.
There are no easy tips for the art of traveling light, which is the art of life itself. We only know there are virtues to be prized - quickness, lightness, grace.
----- ceekster
