There is Being There and Getting There

It is a phrase you often see on posters in high school students' bedrooms or college dorms, sometimes attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Life is a Journey - Not a Destination."

The hidden assertion, usually discerned by those who have outgrown those adolescent lairs, is - "That's only true if you don't know where you are going."

And it is fine, in high school or in college, to not know where you are going. Actually it would be strange if you do, or did. I had students change their major multiple times, and then after graduating with a degree in "multidisciplinary studies" say "Maybe I'll go to grad school, or law school." And what, assuming they could get in, would that change? The point is the first quarter century of one's life is actually a great time to savor the journey, and not worry a whole lot about the destination. These are the years when you can stuff your life into a backpack, get a Eurail Pass or some global equivalent, slip on a T-shirt with the Emerson quote, and wander off into the world.

But then eventually, you are surprised to discover that somehow you have stumbled into the seventh or eighth decade of your life and the Emerson T-shirt doesn't fit as well, or wouldn't if you had any idea where you has left it. The journey and the destination aren't as easily distinguished, or equally valued. The journey, "getting there", is now often radically different from the destination, "being there", and, as I am just now once again learning, "recovering from getting back from there."

So while the Emerson T-shirt might imply that "getting there" and "being there" are two sides of the same coin, nothing really can be further from the truth. When you ask people, those who have not yet retired, what they would like to do when they do retire one of the most common responses is "Oh, I'd like to travel. See the world, ya know?"

To further gild the stereotype, I would further assert that these may be folks who have never traveled far beyond their home town, state, or country. From that perspective, travel does have a nice ring to it. And truthfully, in many instances of "being there" is a lot of fun -  you see new things, you meet new people, you hear new languages  - there's just a whole lot to be said for being in a new place.

I would however, assert that "getting there" in the seventh decade is a far, far different experience than when the T-shirt was fresh.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I need to report that I started this post sitting in the Munich airport having been bumped from our flight from Munich to Chicago last night and where we will spend the night in the strangely brutalist, maybe dorm?, that Lufthansa was willing to put us up in. It was not fun. Bad weather had delayed our flight from Florence here to Munich and Lufthansa didn't hold the connecting flight for us. 

But as we were waiting to get our overnight vouchers and so on, a very irritated woman was storming around the Lufthansa gate saying:

"I'm never going to come to Germany again! I'm never going to fly there again, never never never going to be here again."

She did have her point. Even with my semi-competent German, it was very, very difficult finding our way around the airport; contradictory instructions, wild gesticulations, pointing in many different ways which reminded me of one of my father's famous complaints about his two years trying to drive around Austria. You would ask for directions and the reply would be something like :"Gehen sie links ab und dann gehen sie gerade aus" which sorta means "turn left up here around the corner and then go straight ahead." But with no real clarification as to which corner you turned on and hence which street one was to follow straight ahead - which was further confused by slight jogs which could be seen as "straight ahead."

But I digress. We are now home, where I listen to Christine hacking and coughing her way through some virus we suspect she picked up on our delayed flight back to O'Hare. To continue:

So the seventh decade version of "getting there" also has a place for a backpack. But in this version it serves only to hold the various pills, potions, etc., that somehow have become necessary to everyday life. The second backpack - OK, roll-on luggage piece - contains the electronics necessary to remain in touch with where we are coming from, and to find our way around the places to which we are going. 

Which brings us to the other two monster piece of luggage deemed necessary. We were headed to two cities - Florence and Venice - one predicted to be cold, the other warm. And we had scheduled events both casual and formal. And, unlike the carefree and partner-free days of our youth, there are two of us. OK, so two more big suitcases, both under maximum allowable weigh - which does not automatically qualify them as being under maximum "liftable" weight.

Rather than go on with the inclination to "Oh, oh, tell them about the .  .  ." I am simple going to simply truncate Emerson and assert that, in the seventh decade the journey can be an incredible pain in the butt. A real pain in the butt - especially on 9 hour plane flights - which colors, but thankfully does not totally erase the delights of "being there." And there were those delights - the art, the architecture, the food, all of which were anticipated and lived up to the expectations. And then the unexpected delight of Carnival in Venice, and the "bucket list" experience at the opera at La Fenice.

But the travel calculus [a subject I never understood, but a verb I have always wanted to use] has changed. The question now becomes "What do you wish to experience in a destination that compensates for the discomfort increasingly associated with the journey?

At the moment, I am embarrassingly comfortable just being here. It's not that I would not like to experience other things - lots of stuff. But they now seem to fall into the realm of "Star Trek" desires. By that I mean if I could just have Scotty "beam me up" to those far away places with strange sounding names and beam me back to the comfort of home when I was tired, I'd go in a heartbeat. But right now just seeing a suitcase is disquieting.

So for the time being I will savor distance digitally - great websites out there! Maybe even dip my toe into virtual or augmented reality. Who knows, maybe in some lab somewhere they are working on a app that will allow Scotty to overcome Emerson and beam us up and let us treasure the destination without enduring the trials of the journey - leaving the backpack and the Eurail pass to the kids.