Thoughts Happen

Up for anything — if I can bring my Tempurpedic pillow with me

I have become a person who brings along a pillow when I travel. This is not someone I aspire to be. 

When my high school orchestra went to Mexico City, I sneered inwardly at the kids who ordered hamburguesas from the menu and then wouldn’t eat them when they didn’t look like McDonald’s’.  

Years later, on my honeymoon in Europe, I adapted to the funky sit-down shower-in-a-tub setup we found in our hotels and didn’t mind (much) the interesting smells we encountered on the second-class trains. The two of us squeezed into a twin bed when a single room was all we could get (it was our honeymoon after all) and attempted the local language as much as we could manage.  

I am deeply indebted, however, to the waiter who warned me, in mercifully slowed-down French, that the steak I had just ordered came froid (cold). I didn’t know what that was all about but I certainly didn’t want a cold steak so I ordered something else — I did not yet know that steak tartare is pretty much a pile of raw hamburger with a raw egg on top. 

Nevertheless, I still saw myself as adventurous, freewheeling, ready for anything. 

But whenever I can mange it while traveling anymore, I bring my own pillow.  

It is a very nice pillow.  

However its presence in my belongings while on the road announces loud and clear that I can be bought.  

I chalk it up to my finicky neck and rationalize that I will be a much nicer person if I’ve had a good night’s sleep, which is true, but actually, I’m afraid. I’m afraid to fully experience even the benign adventure of sleeping in someone’s guest room and immerse myself completely in the reality of the situation. 

I’ve become dependent on something external, and I don’t like it. I’ve always looked down on people who have to travel in a little cocoon of comfort, afraid to touch the outside world lest it intrude on their bubble of contentment, but I’m becoming that person.  

This makes me feel weak in the soul, but I do it anyway. It’s a little insulting to my hosts, like saying, “I appreciate your hospitality, but I know you can’t make me feel as comfortable as I do at home, so I’ll just help you out a little.”  

Maybe it’s not that much different from bringing my own toiletries and other things I don’t think twice about; this is just the threshold I notice because it’s so big. And cushy.  

I’m a lobster in the pot after the flame is turned up another notch getting one frightening insight before it’s too late: I’m being boiled.

Photo courtesy Frankicensy on flickr, via Creative Commons

What Defines a Culture? | Kaleidoscopic Wandering

 

Today's Saturday Morning Surf  takes us to Jamaica, courtesy of JoAnna Haugen and her blog, Kaleidoscopic Wandering. I met JoAnna through LinkedIn a couple of years ago and have become a fan of her thougtful travel essays and articles. She's also a kitten foster parent - these are the kinds of things you only learn about your fellow writers through Twitter, which is one of the wonderful, unexplainable things about it. But getting back to Jamaica ... (which I would love to go to sometime, BTW, ... In this post JoAnna examines the idea of the real culture of a place and what that means when you look beyond the surface. I encourage you to read the comments also and add to them if you are so moved -- a lot of interesting dialog there. Here's an excerpt from the post.

"On a recent trip to Jamaica, I found myself annoyed when the group I was with stopped at the local Margaritaville to get a taste of the “real” Jamaica. The beach was packed with beach chairs and cluttered with tourists who shelled out bundles of cash for slushy alcoholic drinks in plastic cups and strings of beads being sold by local hawkers."

via kaleidoscopicwandering.com

Zen Mind, Vacation Mind

I recently meditated on New York City for a week. Technically it was a family vacation, but even though we hauled our asses all over Manhattan until our feet ached and we inhaled a year’s worth of secondhand smoke, I felt refreshed, and no wonder. I was practicing Vacation Mind.

There is no “Before We Left” in Vacation Mind. There is no “After We Get Back” in Vacation Mind. There is only Right Now, as in Right Now, I am completely immersed in the Arms and Armor collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and even though the sum total  that I have ever thought about Arms and Armor before now has probably added up to a few random hours while reading “King Arthur,” I can somehow find nothing so fascinating, at least for the next 20 minutes.

Ditto for Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, the view from the Empire State Building and the tacky glory that is Times Square. If meditation is placing the mind completely on one object, then I think I meditated plenty on subway signs, walk signals, maps and menus.

No wonder the root of “vacation” is “vacate.” We vacated our normal lives for six blissful days of Right Now, where the most important thing we had to worry about was which train do we take to get from the Lower East Side to Midtown, and our most pressing decision was should we do Tibetan, Turkish or Brazilian for dinner. The nagging minutiae of our Non-Vacation lives was left behind.

After we got back I thought about Vacation Mind, wondering if I could trick the ol’ mind into believing it was still on vacation, that worry-free state of contentment in the Now, for even a few minutes a day. But instead of New York City it would be — CVS! Could I manage to take a mini-vacation in the toothpaste aisle, meditating on the boxes of Crest and Colgate to the exclusion of everything else?

Not sure how well that’s going to work out, but if you’re in Southern California and see me at the drugstore staring entranced at stacks of toilet paper, don’t bother me. I’m on vacation.