The Distances Between Us


     I once ran a focus group for a class of fourteen year-old schoolboys.  It involved my getting them to consider what was essential and what was inessential through the following hypothetical:

     You are all alone on a desert island.  You have been only able to bring one thing with you.  What is it?


     Every boy but one wanted to bring an electronic device with him, be it a personal computer, a stereo, a PlayStation (trademark) or an HDTV.  The one boy who did not answer as the others did, said he would bring his German Shepherd.

     Which makes me think of our "connectivity"and the proposition that the distances between us have shrunk as a result of computers.  In some ways the distances are greater: I now interact with a host of people I have never met who are essential to the orderly conduct of my life, such as wireless internet and cable TV personnel,  customer service representatives at banks and mutual fund companies, health insurance company employees. --Even my accountant, who "tweets" to exchange information, information I cannot digest because the brevity of the message lacks the context I need to make sense of the text.

     As Isaac Babel entitled one of his short stories, "You Must Know Everything".  Yet you cannot reach understanding.   There are too many intermediaries, each doing only his assigned little task outside a larger context.   The person who understands best and could explain it to you is the furthest away from your reach, because in giant organizations serving thousands, if not millions of customers, you are slotted into the work-flow chart as a consumer, not an individual.  Your understanding of the world of the internet, of financial services, of health care, is mediated by number-crunchers and management consultants and marketing specialists, rather than professionals with whom you interact face-to-face. Because it is too expensive to provide professional services at rates that are competitive with all the other participants in the market.  So these businesses are driven by the number-crunchers and the management consultants and the markets, whose job it is to segment transactions into their smallest possible components and then hand the bundle of tasks to human resources departments, which distribute them out through the organization to the lowest rungs of the organization, which are the ones you interact with.

   The appeal of travel is that we are the fulcrum of the experience, and our understanding cannot be taken from us or interpreted for us by another.  Which is why so many of us strive to record our journeys, whether in images or words.    To focus on preparing for a journey is to begin it, to shatter the routine, and challenge the notion that the coordinates of our lives are fixed.  But it is also to break free from the drivers of our daily existence, from the numbness that successive interactions with them inevitably produce.  To break free after being "plugged in" to our jobs, day-in-and-day-out .

     So if you were to ask me why I would undertake a trip as open-ended and potentially arduous as I have previously described, I would have to answer,

                                                        Because I'm looking for the dog.