This is not something we hear often, and certainly not from people we are, ourselves, inspired by.
Today would have been a very dull day, one of those days when travelling which seems not to really count as a day, but just a sort of waiting room. I don't mind those,days, in fact you need them, particularly if you are travelling for nearly a year. You can't gave an adventure every day, and nobody dies, whatever they tell you. Today we are more or less stranded as our hotel is out of town to the tune of two hundred Bolivians worth of taxi, and our train is booked for ten past midnight. It's been an amazing few days crossing the salt flats and, silly as it might sound, we are in danger of becoming a little inured to being amazed, so we need the time. We settle into a cozy nook by a fire and set to work attempting to record the events and sights of the past few days in blogs.
When a couple from Delhi ask if we would mind if they joined us, and we have the usual conversation about how long they are staying for, where we are all from and what we are doing, we don't expect it to blossom into an interaction which gives us a much needed boost.
I don't expect people to admire us, when we say what we are doing. I expect them to envy us, sometimes even to judge us for our privileged status, or to eye us strangely, wondering what we are doing, wasting our time sitting in armchairs tapping into gadgets when we should be out there, earning our travelling status with non stop adventures.
In fact, today we are feeling a little grumpy about travelling. The hotel is expensive, which we didn't quite intend, we are tired and it's just that time in the journey when home seems near enough to yearn for, just a bit.
When I tell the couple from Delhi what we are doing I attach to it automatically the usual mantra about knowing how very lucky we are, how privileged, how much we know that not everyone had the opportunity to do this. And I mean it. Despite our rather travel weary moods today, I am acutely aware of how jealous I used to be when my peers leaving university went traveling on gap years, or had already been on them before they began. Money, neither then nor for at least the next decade following, was a huge barrier to me in respect of most things, most of all travelling abroad. I had tied myself in knots made out of IOU's and bank loans, following a lot of fun - mixed with very little sense - at university. It is only because I managed to get a job which paid enough to repay the debts and save up enough to sinpky take a year put, that I am able to do this. That what I happen to enjoy and be good(ish) at happens to be paid well is absolute coincidence and nothing of my earning. (My other passion, writing, pays virtually nothing). That I was able to train to get this job required a reasonable level of academic ability, and that I had that was also coincidence. That I have 'absolutely deserved and earned and made possible this trip of my own hard work' is only true at the very surface. The rest was sheer luck. And luck is no respecter of whether you earned it.
So it is astonishing to me that these people might learn what it is we are doing and respond with such enthusiastic approval.
I express these thoughts, and our new friends explain, earning my own admiration in the process.
Travelling, they say, is one of the most effective ways of developing empathy. By seeing other cultures and learning to understand them, we may learn to look at other human beings, and see similarities rather than grate against differences. We see that every person is, just that, another person, with all the same capacity of thought and emotion as ourselves, just perhaps arranged or expressed in different patterns. If we can learn to tolerate the differences we find in other cultures, to admire the great things in them, and understand the flaws as something we too, in that position, might falter on, we will become better people. If we can see poverty, and feel something real, feel a compassion which owes more to empathy than to pity, if we can return to our own culture, where we are privileged and still remember the suffering, the beauty and the wisdom we saw elsewhere, then we can grown rich in something much greater than money.
As a result, this couple had brought up their two sons with an emphasis on travel, and through it, on tolerance, kindness and the understanding of the transient nature, not just of material goods and money itself, but of the pleasure they bring to you.
It strikes me, listening to them talking, that this couple may have inspired their sons through more than just travel itself.
"We went with our sons to Goa," they tell us, "but Goa is a party place and so they were sleeping all day and partying through the night
We realised we wouldn't see them. So we just did the same. We slept in the day and went out partying with our sons at night."
It seems to me that these patents are, themselves, an inspiration to their children, albeit through the medium of travel. How many parents, rather than simply arguing with their, then grown up, sons about how they should conduct the family holiday, would simply have opened themselves up to experiencing Goa, their sons' way? And how much richer were they for acquiring that experience?
I recount the gist of an article M had read recently, which charted the length of time for which people's happiness levels spiked, depending on stimuli. The overwhelming evidence being that, once you passed a certain threshold and had enough money to be fed and comfortable, more money only have you a temporary happiness boost. Other short lived boosts included the acquisition of a new house or a new car. By far the longer lasting happiness inducers were experiences. These lifted people's overall happiness levels for a much longer period of time, barely tailing off, and this applied both to good and bad experiences.
"Exactly!" cry our friends, "we read something similar and we are trying to become rich in experiences. Money is easy to get. Happiness is harder."
Every year this couple from Delhi travel for one month. Just long enough to acquire experience and deepen their understanding and tolerance for humanity. Not so long that their work would suffer, which is something they take a pride in but the money from which, ultimately, in reinvested in the much more valuable asset - experience.
"I don't know why you're so impressed by us!" I say, "we are far more impressed by you!"
A mutual appreciation society it may be, but I really mean it. I love the way this couple have chosen to conduct their lives and the way they have brought up their children. They talk about the value of looking after others before oneself, something they tried, through travel, to imbue in their sons, and I agree wholeheartedly. (In fact they cite the key tenants of the Sikh religion here, which sound, as I comment, remarkably similar to those of Christianity. Or Buddhism. Or, for that matter, Islam.)
As for their sons, I can't imagine what more they could learn from us either.
"I seem to have too much money," one of their sons recently told them, "so I'd like to spend some on taking you on holiday." He doesn't have millions. He just has more than he needs. As do many of us in developed countries. But you very rarely hear somebody say its too much.
They have a son with a house in America, he uses the house as a means to go travelling. He lets it out through AirBnB, and the money he gets from it pays for him to view every weekend as a vacation.
What a way to live. I appreciate that these people, like me, were born lucky enough to have aptitudes which pay, and education, which untaps them, but they are taking their life seriously, the way people should, working hard to avoid the same ruts which many people spend three quarters of the lives unhappily accepting.
When we finally take our leave of these people, it is with a sense, I think on both sides, of being richer for having swapped life outlooks with them. I have ideas and principals buzzing in my mind, some previously held but now endorsed, some entirely new and to be added to my list of new wisdoms I hope to try to hang on to, once I get home.
This couple would have been an enrichment to our lives whenever we met them,but I felt that they couldn't have appeared in our landscape at a more appropriate time. Just as we began to feel jaded, they appeared to provide nor must hollow endorsement but new and dead, reinforcing and building on convictions we had held earlier, and which were still there but beginning to be stifled, starved of air beneath piles of petty worries or wearinesses.
I wish that couple the very best in their continuing collection of experiences. May they be rich in memories, love and even greater wisdom.
We swapped email addresses. I hope we keep in touch.
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