What a trip (thus far), I can say literally and figuratively. I don't exactly have anything new to say about travelling that I haven't already expressed, but I always hope to find some nuance if I dig a little deeper. My last slew of entries about our road trip defaulted to a bland reporting sort of style (look at these stupid photos), but I feel like I missed out on some deeper mind nuggets that were just too difficult to appreciate after hours and weeks of riding, day in and day out.
The constant fluctuation of my mood largely dictates how I feel about this whole experience (the experience being moving away from home with no concrete destination or goal other than to explore). As I've mentioned before, in bouts of nostalgia the days and weeks can feel so long. The happy, comforting memories of home seem distant, residing on the fringes of my mind where they are hard to recall clearly. What is easy to recall, however, is a sort of delusion that my "previous" mode of existence was all gumdrops and cuddly puppies. This nostalgia feeds strange thoughts that, when distilled, sound like "Travel isn't for me" or "I'm not cut out for this." Surely I had a different set of challenges while living in California, and now I've traded them for new ones. And one of those challenges is figuring out what the hell I'm doing with my life now. Who am I? In a sort of Derek Zoolander voice.
It's hard to realize when these moods sneak up on me, feeding little self-defeating ideas to my conscious mind so stealthily that it just sounds like me. Of course the difference is sort of moot, but are you defined by the thoughts you have or the actions you perform? Maybe it's a conceptual problem of identity (a problem that we can think about in myriad ways). Look at the nature/nurture question, for instance. You've heard about this in any science class—is it your genetic makeup or your environment that determines your behavior? It's a very binary question, and we have trouble seeing things differently when we distill such massive, complicated concepts into simple words such as environment. These terms get thrown around without really getting unpacked and re-examined from time to time. But I propose we do a little mental maintenance to how we view these things.
So do your good thoughts make you good if you don't have a corresponding way to express them? Or what about being intensely cynical minded yet remain ostensibly neutral? In terms of nature and nurture, it's not one or the other—it's the interaction between both. Yin and yang, win and lose. You can't have one without the other (if a certain sitcom theme song popped into your head you're not alone, my friend). But are do even thoughts and actions completely encompass the totality of who we are? This was just a starting point, but I already think the binary is too simplistic to effectively describe us as humans.
And I feel the need to make a note, it isn't my intention to inflate our already bolstering ego. We surely have intelligence in many ways, but I could come up with a litany of things that might illuminate some serious dysfunction as a species. The delusion is in thinking that because we're the most intelligent species around that we are above reproach for our actions. We're doing the best we can, one might say. Well there's always room for improvement. And for most of the millionbillionzillion years it took for us to arrive at this point, this improvement was in our genetic fitness. Or at least that's what we're taught in school. Without some record of written communication or art we have sort of consigned our ancestors to be in some intellectual black hole. So much so that any representation of primitive hominids shows them to be somewhat savage (and yet do we, speaking generally, not still have these savage thoughts that stem from fear of other races or sexualities).
But I would even suggest that our improvement as humans can happen on a much shorter time scale. For instance, our brains haven't changed much at all over the past few thousand, or even million, years—yet cultural development has changed drastically even within the last few hundred years. Yes, we certainly still have problems to deal with. But it's pretty clear that the speed with which we can educate mass numbers of people is a pretty powerful feat. Knowledge can be transmitted so quickly, and even more so with the onset of global communication. There's a powerful acceleration of connection happening all over the world, and this is vaulting us into new territories that affect the way our brains develop. Consequently, this is why I suggest we take mental stock frequently. And what I mean by this is pretty simple. Read some books about the world, meet new people, understand their feelings and desires, and keep building on those existing philosophies. For instance, acceptance of homosexuality has increased so drastically within the past few decades. I think that's a tremendous sign of our plasticity—overcoming previously formed fears that were not grounded in any reality. It's hard to imagine how those thoughts even would have surfaced in the first place, so much that people's thoughts somehow turned into rules, regulations, and laws that dictate how other people can express themselves.
So in some respect, thoughts that go unchecked can be quite detrimental. So what's the solution? And how can we be sure that the policies we create won't have a negative effect somewhere down the line? I can't say conclusively, but I'll circle back to the simple answer: make an effort to know other people. And this means making no assumptions. You will never know another person entirely, not even your wife of seventy years. The other people on this planet, everyone else but you, will always have some private thoughts that they will never share with you. They might try, but it's impossible. You surely have more thoughts per day than you even have words for, let alone time to write or speak them. It doesn't matter if you think at the speed of light. Given that we're on separate channels most of the time, it behooves you to take those brief, fleeting moments to reciprocate. I think of those lonely people I've met who talk incessantly without pause. I don't mind getting to know you in that way, but if you make no effort to ask a question and incorporate new ideas into that stream of thought, you continue to be a broken record. It's all about the remix, collaboration.
Digression aside, this could be a compelling reason for needing philosophy as a discipline. We all have zillions of thoughts swimming around our heads, sometimes in words or songs or images or memories of smiles or clenched teeth. If you were to plot your brain activity on a graph, one axis being general mood and the other being expectations for the future, you'd quite possibly see a nightmare of zigs and zags. Well, at least I can say that for myself, and I don't want to assume I know your feelings better than you do.
But what does philosophy do for us? Why do we even have it as a field of study in college? Well, it provides some consistent modes of thinking that are often much more practical, for one. It allows us to explore systems of thoughts without letting other wildcards and variables interfere with what might be a useful way of seeing the world. This doesn't just happen in one philosopher or one generation, but it is an accumulation of knowledge and *different* perspectives that allows us to craft new, pragmatic ideologies. Surely as a species we can't expect the same schools of thought to apply 100% to the collective challenges of our generation. We have to remix and adapt certain bits, but also build new ones.
And they don't come out of the ether. It starts with you, but as a social creature you're not alone. This is when I say we all need to hold hands and sing together in song. Hokey rhetoric aside, I believe there's some truth in this (this being the bullshit I've just spouted at you for the past few minutes without asking you how your day went). But seriously, I believe we have power over our lifetime to challenge some pretty sneaky, confining thought patterns before they bleed into social systems. Just as much as I believe in plate tectonics or hydrogen atoms. I've never seen a hydrogen atom up close and personal, but I believe they exist. It's certainly hard to measure people's happiness or goodness, but even if it's not quantifiable I think we can at least identify it on an emotional level. What the hell is a friend, anyway, if not somebody who makes you feel good about yourself, and vice versa? And when it comes to our progression as a social species, I believe that we are capable of making healthy decisions for our species and our home: this tiny planet Earth.
As our 2012 UCSB Commencement speaker (whose name I've forgotten) said, people usually tell you in these sorts of speeches to go off and live your dreams. But that would land most of us in jail. Dreams, and even many of our thoughts, are noisy, obscuring things that can get in the way of, well, reality. But what sort of reality do you want for yourself? For each other? And don't you need to start with some sort of dream? But this sort of dream isn't the same. You're making a conscious decision here: you want something to change. That's what this type of dream is—a realization. It's thinking of something that currently is not, and the trick is finding the path to bring it into fruition. And this is happening all the time! So don't just dream. Realize!
So what does this have to do with travel? Well, I can fly halfway across the world and come back just as backwards and benighted as any ignorant fool. I could also walk the same path from my house to school every morning and learn new things about myself and the world around me. It really comes down to effort and attention. In a cynical way, just moving your body to another location doesn't automatically fill you with sagacious thoughts. The problem is that the mind doesn't always want to open; as plastic as it is, it also grows weary at the thought of confronting new realities—especially when that can potentially shatter the way you see yourself. That's where all of these hilariously, crazy delusional biases spring up. It's so much easier to accept some delusion than accept a reality that challenges who you think you are. In this way our brains can pull a veil over our eyes, feeding us a reality that is not.
Sometimes this is happening on a physiological level. For instance, when some people experience ocular migraines they may not see an object in front of them, but rather it is filled in by something that resembles the surrounding landscape. For instance, you might look for the clock on the wall but someone seems to have taken it down—you only see more wall. This happens when your ocular nerve's blind spot (scotoma) is widened and your brain's visual processing centers have to do their best to fill in what you see in front of you. So in essence, you're seeing what is not a shared reality. But you are 100% convinced, at least just from looking, that there is no clock on the wall.
Now that was a sort of medical, physical example, but this sort of conundrum manifests in myriad ways—notably also on a conceptual level (not physiological; though it's important to identify the brain structures responsible for cognition/perception). I've mentioned cognitive dissonance before—believing two mutually exclusive ideas simultaneously. And unfortunately confronting these things is not easy, but once you become aware of them you have to make a choice. You can either change your mind, or convince yourself that what you're thinking about isn't worthy of more attention. And that's the alarming danger in all of this—that you can just ignore, for fear of confronting yourself, some of the things that are most deserving of your attention.
So whether you fly around the world or consign yourself to one general area for a duration, the important thing is the mentality of accepting new realities. Realities that involve other people's thoughts, feelings, and wants. In some way they become part of you.
