I was 19-years old when I started traveling solo. At first, I followed the beaten trail through the backpacker hostels of Europe. Later in my 20s and 30s, I adventured through dozens of less-trodden countries, including so-called “dangerous” places that my parents told me not to go. Then, over this last decade, I found myself settling down in a hippie nomad hub.
The ancestral spiritual pilgrimage that I took through China this summer was different. Maybe because it’s been a while since I really traveled (and by that I mean going on the road without agenda, without companion, and only a loose sense of destination). My trip was an open sequence of locations unconstrained by itinerary. I was free to move in exploration, without the weight of obligation. What happened was largely spontaneous.
Travel interrupts routine and activates novelty – that “figuring out” process. Solo travel in particular helps us discover unmediated preferences, as we spend quality time with ourselves. And then there is the hyper-presence of organizing newness every day: where to sleep; what to eat; how to get from A to B. When solo in a strange land, we do this without a frame of reference to triangulate who and how we are on a daily basis.
For me, solo travel purifies presence. It does so by removing habits, one of the pillars holding up the illusion of permanence. As certainty and stability are intentionally collapsed, we get left with an uncomfortable truth: we cannot hold onto anything that’s happening.
Traveling makes me aware that I’m constantly standing in a new place then another then another – knowing that each new station will likely never be visited again once it’s left. When I make contact with this, the blinding effect of familiarity fades and impermanence comes into focus. Each moment we touch is unique, even if many are too unremarkable to note as they pass. It’s always like that. We’re just always forgetting.
At home or on the road. Alone or together. Regardless of context, experience can only be replicated, never repeated. No matter how carefully we make copies, it’s never quite the same again. Even if we retrace our steps, even if we deliberately walk back over the exact same path, the experience shifts because the one walking is now different. After we move through a moment, there’s no going back. But we often grasp at imitations of a known version of reality because there’s comfort in that.
In the echo chamber of life-on-loop, instances of experience mimic their former selves with a variation on known events. As long as we numb the pain of loss with the effort of repetition, the echoes available seem infinite to us. But we can’t see how much time is left on the clock until our time is up. We never know when it’s the last time we’ll do something, until it’s done. This is the paradox of life’s preciousness: it often eludes us as it’s occurring. We commonly only appreciate what is already lost.
Changing locations and disrupting routine is a way to access the uniqueness of experience, as it’s arranged along the dimension of time. Travel helps us see this by increasing the contrast on reality from moment to moment. That can heighten appreciation, even if only for short while.
What’s interesting to me is seeing how the uniqueness of experience that exists across time also exists across space. There are different ways to notice it. Without ever moving from a given place, we can learn to see how un-repeatability is arranged along the dimension of space.
Not long ago, I went on a nature walk with a friend. We sat on the same rock, facing the same direction. A casual observer would think we’re both taking in the scenery: a sun-drenched valley spread out before us on a hot summer evening. But my eyes are closed. Noting the texture of light as it make shapes on the backs of my eyelids. His eyes are open. Perhaps seeing the atmosphere bend as heat rises from the ridge opposite us.
We inhabited the same moment in time. We occupied the same location in space, or near enough. Despite this proximity in both time and space, we were having subtly (yet vastly) different experiences.
No one else can share our life experience, from beginning to end, from the inside out. We can only build bridges to connect experiences. This is true whether we share space with someone for minutes or for decades; whether we’re talking politics with a taxi driver or sharing intimate feelings with our partner. No one else can see, have, hold, or fully understand our experience, because experience is circum-located by perspective.
If you feel like you’re completely alone in your experience of Life, you are correct about that. The thing is: so is everyone else. And that shared experience is what allows us to connect. The tragedy of aloneness is also the beauty of it. Existential isolation is necessary for coming together. Knowing that no one can share our entire world – no matter how much we talk about it – fuels a limitless desire to communicate and connect.
Person-level differences, and indeed the strangeness we perceive in others, make us curious about alternate experiences. Without this, we could easily be consumed by our own unending interpretation and narration of phenomena. The strangeness of it all makes us wonder, what’s it like for you? The not-understanding draws us closer to each other. If we already knew what it was like to be someone else, we wouldn’t bother to ask.
Yet the best we can do is tell each other stories, and try to relate another’s story to something resonant from our own. Aloneness compels us to meet, to share, to listen, to ask questions, to try to find a common thread.
The uniqueness of experience across both time and space is a beautiful thing. The wonder surrounding what can never be articulated, only approximated — this brings us into deeper connection with everything that is.
Incarnation requires us to forge an individual path and navigate personal lessons. And there’s also a cheat code for a game slightly more advanced. We expand the impact of impressions received as we share them with others. This is how we accelerate collective evolution, by building bridges between islands of perception: using language, emotion, and imagination. Through connection, we can live many lives at once.