What’s it that sends a tingle by way of your physique while you look upon Victoria Falls or the Grand Canyon? I’ve come to consider journey experiences as meals for the soul. However I suppose I’ve solely taken a circuitous path to the apparent.
P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian mathematician, wrote a memoir that described his journey experiences with a Caucasian mystic named Georges Gurdjieff. It was known as In Search of the Miraculous and was an interesting glimpse right into a non-Western thoughts.
Certainly one of Gurdjieff’s many desirable concepts that set me to pondering was that there are three sorts of meals. There may be what we usually confer with as meals, issues we ingest, equivalent to cheeseburgers, pizza, and so on. You’ll be able to survive just a few weeks with out meals, even much less time with out water. Finally you want meals to maintain life.
The second sort of meals, he mentioned, is air, your breath. You’ll be able to solely go a couple of minutes with out air. It’s extra very important, and in addition extra ethereal. It’s one other order of matter.
However the third sort of meals he spoke of consists of your impressions. With out your sensory impressions, he mentioned, you’d die immediately. In response to Gurdjieff, your senses join you to the engine of the universe. Your eyes, ears, contact, motion, all of your senses, named and unnamed, transmit vitality to you in lots of types.
He mentioned, “The stream of impressions coming to us from exterior is sort of a driving belt speaking movement to us. The principal motor for us is nature, the encircling world. Nature transmits to us by way of our impressions the vitality by which we stay and transfer and have our being. If the influx of this vitality is arrested our machine will instantly cease working.”
Once I first learn this, it struck me as odd, actually. I’d by no means considered something that means. However on the identical time, it made sense. It didn’t crumble below nearer examination. Quite the opposite, the concept your sensory impressions are a sort of nourishment appeared not so far-fetched.
In the event you consider it that means, it presents a sort of a hierarchy of the energies which might be the driving forces of life, from gross to tremendous. The bodily meals we devour gives the essential vitality to take care of the bodily physique, the machine. The breath transmits a better frequency of vitality, and nourishes us another way.
The sensory impressions are but a better order of vitality, a finer frequency. It consists of vitality as info. It’s nonphysical, however transmits vitality to your thoughts and spirit that may ignite bodily vitality within the physique.
The vary of data you obtain by way of your senses is infinite. The entire issues we see, hear and really feel carry vitality from the surface world. Every particular person has a singular standpoint. To paraphrase composer John Cage, the present is in every single place, and everyone seems to be in the most effective seat.
It’s not all the identical, nonetheless. Some issues carry finer types of vitality than others. Whenever you go right into a museum and see a portray and you might be moved, what has that portray transmitted to you? What has it advised you? How has it expanded or enriched you? How would possibly it have modified your standpoint or your understanding of one thing? Possibly it solely gave you a wave of happiness and appreciation. All these impressions are a sort of meals for the soul.
What do you obtain while you have a look at one other particular person? Folks watching remains to be top-of-the-line journey actions. Each face tells a narrative, as does each phrase, each gesture, each article of clothes. How a lot info is conveyed by a facial features? Researchers have proven that human beings understand the human face with much more precision and element than some other factor.
There are totally different qualities of expertise. A lot of the repetitive routine of every day life makes no lasting impression and is forgotten. However there are some moments you’ll bear in mind vividly all of your life. These extraordinary experiences occur extra typically once we journey and plunge into a brand new atmosphere.
These particular experiences change into part of you, part of who you might be, how you’ve gotten grown, and what you’ve gotten discovered. The particular experiences, the “memorable” moments, not the repetitive run-of-the-mill moments, stay inside you. Probably the most extraordinary moments go away vivid recollections. To me these recollections are like little rooms in my thoughts that I can all the time return to and luxuriate in once more, and perhaps carry some enjoyment to another person by sharing the expertise.
As a devoted traveler, I’ve been privileged to expertise a variety of experiences. To have perceived all of the issues I’ve been lucky to watch in my travels does certainly really feel like meals for the soul, nourishment on essentially the most profound ranges of my being. And it’s a sort of meals that can provide me nourishment once more years after the actual fact. It’s an vitality that transcends boundaries of time and house.
The impressions that final, that “go away an impression” on you, solidify in you as recollections. And we will feed on these for the remainder of our lives.
I really feel profoundly enriched by the valuable journey experiences that may be known as forth from reminiscence by any random affiliation. They might be triggered by one thing in dialog or one thing that I see or learn. Some impression immediately would possibly carry again a type of recollections. It’s nice to have the ability to relive them in reminiscence
Journey experiences that are actually constructed into the fiber of my being, are among the most beneficial issues I’ll ever possess. They actually have way more lasting worth than all of my materials possessions.
Subsequent to the love between myself and my family members, my journey experiences rank on the prime of my private hierarchy of values.
I do consider these items. Journey is sweet for the soul.
All the most effective,
A. Colin Treadwell
