“Traveling Close, Very Close, To Home”
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the definition of travel is “to go on or as if on a trip or tour” (1). It is assumed that if one says they are traveling they are referring to a vacation of some kind. That idea, though, is challenged by Suzanne Berne in her article, “Traveling Close, Very Close To Home”. She argues the point that traveling is not just a trip to some far off land but rather a certain mentality that the traveler has. Berne states, “travel, like relaxation, is mostly a state of mind” (Berne 413).
Berne insists that though one might be traveling in the sense of leaving his/her area of comfort, they are not really traveling unless they have a desire for an adventure. Traveling is all about the experiences you gather and the new knowledge you learn. The trips that make a person yearn to keep experiencing and searching are the trips that truly define travel. You may be leaving your home state, but if you still have the same slow attitude towards life, you’re not traveling but rather finding a new place to relax and take a nap. She uses the modern day entrepreneur as an example to prove her point, “the business person who flies to Rome and then never leaves her hotel” (413). In her mind this trip to Rome would not be considered travel because the traveler only left to find another area of relaxation and did not try to expand her mind. Throughout the trip she stayed inside her area of comfort, never leaving her safe place in order to gain new memories or experience the new culture. The idea of the commuter who drives to work 75 miles away but says he hasn’t left in months is an example used to show how physical travel does not equal traveling of the soul (413). This commuter is able to leave and explore, but he is too caught up in his own world of work that he is not able to enjoy the beauty he has driven through. Physically traveling to another place is not enough to say that you have...