Travel Baby

 

Mexico City looks like Mexico City looks like Mexico City. Am I jaded? I feel like I skip across the surface of the world like a skimmed stone over a frozen lake, leaving little lines of scraped ice behind it.

In the Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, the prophet figure of the Monks of History is called Wen the Eternally Surprised. 

“Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.”

I thought about this recently when meeting a good friend’s new baby. Every day he was learning a new thing. What a foot is. How to make a particular funny noise. What happens when you squeeze your diaphragm such as you expel a foul smelling brown slurry. Watch me shit myself! God, to be able to shit myself and feel such easy pleasure in it. I hardly enjoy shitting myself at all any more, and it has happened to me more often than I’d like of late, which is to say a number higher than zero.

Occasionally the feeling creeps up on me, and I’m blindsided by a joy that seems to surge up my legs like it came from somewhere underground, punching through my sandals and entering under my heel. Well, who can understand the human brain? Why bother trying? My own self-directed CBT has failed in the face of such mercurial impulses. Who knows why I think anything about anything? One day I’ll be rich enough to have a private long-term therapist and I’ll be able to gesture vaguely at myself and ask for a best guess, but that day is not today. 

These strange little surges of joy have always happened to me. They feel almost physical. I’d like to have them all the time. I feel like I meet people who seem to constantly have this capacity to be “eternally surprised”, to constantly take joy in new experiences. But instead I sit down to attempt a bit of ‘still life’ writing and find nothing around me is catching my brain. Everywhere is somewhere that people live. They don’t sit outside pubs with their wanky little Bluetooth keyboard trying to find profundity in it. And it's not like I'm not enjoying myself when I don't try to find too much meaning in it.

What this all comes back to really is that though my Spanish improves every day, I’ve hit the point where the curve gets steeper. I can navigate most practical situations or at least guess what needs to be said, but the only way I will ever get good from here is to subject people to my lumpen attempts at dialogue. Well, there’s a hundred thousand blogs called “Learning A Language While Anxious” which all butt up against this. The solution is: you do it or you don’t. Is this important to you, or is it not? Because there isn’t ever really going to be an engagement with a place beyond the aesthetic until you speak the language. So (not unusually) this is all just a more-serpentine-than-usual kind of self-criticism. If I want to feel better about this I need to put in more work. And I hate work!

Perhaps you can be Eternally Surprised. Perhaps you can be a baby forever. But fundamentally, travelling (unless you aren’t interested in agonising over these sorts of things, in which case all power to you) does actually require work to get something out of it. You get back what you give, etc and so on. So you can go home, or you can meet the point where idleness becomes something which I guess you have to call “working on yourself”, though I’d love for there to be a non-therapised way to describe it. Until then you’ll keep on skimming.