Traveling Lightly

Today I was driving along the thin roads that lead me to and from the northern elementary school of my town when I started to think about all the people who are drifting around the lands and seas of the world. Those people, who are usually also the ones who know how to travel light, can go months, years, and even decades living among people with whom they cannot speak fluently. They seem to drift over the globe like exotic butterflies in gusts of wind. They bring little resistance and thus go with the flow, gently flapping their paper-thin wings.


Life, too, can be light for those who travel lightly. Various forms of social reality cannot reach them when they are drifting in such foreign lands. Their identity, for example, loses much of its prior (domestic) substance. They might become like the tame Nara deer in the photo above, not subject to being bothered by the passing, however real, events that constantly move around them.

At the same time, the life of the world traveler can be densely packed with indescribable, inexpressible emotion that makes life heavy, rich, and sometimes frustrating. They may become faced with the world traveler's dilemma: so many experiences that they simply cannot contain them as vivid or meaningful memories. It is a twisted sort of poverty for those people who have seen so much and felt so much that that which they most want to be able to relate to everyone around them is also that which they cannot communicate. They are, to put it simply, speechless. And speechlessness can be painful. Perhaps it is a similar kind of hindered expression that makes some young kids cry so much.