I’ve always been visited by bouts of irresistible wanderlust; a call to explore the multiverse that is so overwhelmingly powerful that it demands redress. I don’t remember a life without feeling a yearning to travel. As with my desire to read, wanderlust was something that I seemed to be born with.

I recall the five year old me dreaming of exploring. My father had an atlas of the world, a huge book, and a globe.  I would spend time looking through the maps at the different counties and I yearned to visit them.  I formed a vague plan to take a bus across the sea to France and drive until the land ran out. I went as far as contemplating whether anyone would transport a bus from Russia to Alaska so I could drive through the Americas. My young brain did not have a concept of border control and The Cold War at that point, so anything was possible in my mind.

I could not articulate why I wanted to do that journey.  All I knew is that I wanted to experience “something else” the reasons why were unknown to me. When I finally began my first trip backpacking across the USA at the age of 20, I could not have articulated the “why” then either. The idea of wanting “something else” implies dissatisfaction with current circumstances. While that was the case as a young person, my love of travel has not abated into middle age where that sense of dissatisfaction is no longer present. What drives a person to travel can run a little deeper than unhappiness with one’s current circumstances.

After that first trip to the USA, it felt less like a holiday and more of an achievement. I had been frequently alone in this fast continent with no one to rely upon except myself. I could not be bailed out as my parents did not even have passports. I had to cope alone and I did. I had proved to myself that I could be independent. That I could manage on my own resources.  Initially going the USA did feel like a bit of an easy trip, mostly because everyone speaks English, so when planning the trip it did not feel like really abroad to me.  Soon after landing in the USA, I found that despite the commonalty of language, here I was in a culture that was radically different to my own and having a shared language did not automatically mean a shared understanding. I emerged from that journey stronger, more confident with an expanded world view and with a great love of the road.

To my mind travelling is not the same as a holiday and not quite the same as tourism. I have divided people who travel into broadly three groups. There are probably others and sub groups within them. Broadly speaking, I see holiday makers, tourists and travellers as 3 groups with some overlap between them. Your holiday maker is driven by the need to relax, to take some respite from their daily lives and will spend most of their time abroad at a resort chilling out. Sounds nice, must try it sometime, I have never done it. Tourists may also do this sometimes but are driven by the need to explore more than for the need for rest and relaxation. I have seen over the years that some travellers have a tendency to look down on the tourist which I don’t think is very fair as tourists and travellers will have a lot in common. Both are actively looking to explore the places they are visiting, both groups will, for example, visit the Hagia Sophia and expect to get something out of it, such as more knowledge, a sense of wonder or a spiritual experience. What distinguishes the two groups is that the traveller views what happens at the airport as just as significant and important as what happens at the Hagia Sophia.  The traveller views the actual journey of going from A to B as a valuable part of their experience. That’s makes them a traveller. The traveller will tend to have lighter luggage only bringing the bare essentials with them and items that are easily discarded. It is the role of the Traveller with which I most identify and each traveller has their own reasons for making the journey.

When I ask myself the question today, “Why do I travel?”  It feels like more of a pertinent question for me now than it was for my younger self. My body is complaining progressively louder about the physical challenges of travelling. At the time of writing I have been back at the UK for nearly a month following my latest exploits and my body is still complaining…so why?  Why do I travel?  It’s still difficult to answer that question with a logical answer. This is because wanderlust does not exist in the logical parts of our brains. Wanderlust is much deeper and lives in the deep realms of the unconscious, within the realms of soul, a yearning so deep within me it overcomes all feelings of Hiraeth that I may experience immediately before a trip.

Hiraeth is a welsh word that does not translate easily into English, often its described as “homesickness” but its more complex than that.  It is nostalgia and grief for something you will never have again. I have that feeling of grief for something that is passing and will never be again each time I embark on a journey. While my home town will be waiting for me on my return,  I will be different after my journey, so that relationship that I have with the town will never be quite the same again. Through the journey I am embarking on a process of change, an initiation. So I grieve my current relationship before I step one foot onto the transport that will take me overseas, yet I must press on. The call to adventure demands it, the deep stirring of the soul to explore fully this life that has been gifted to me.

Most of us have dual and contradictory natures and while I have a love of travel I also have a love of home. As humans we seem to spend a lot of time concerned with our own consistency when we are in fact not always consistent or rational.  Human beings are in themselves an interzone of opposing forces.  The chaos magician seeks to connect with those contradictory forces within us as they are the forces of chaos which transcends binary illusions. Allowing our contradictory natures simply “to be” instead of forcing a self imposed consistency upon ones psyche, enables us to perceive the oneness of Chaos that resides within.  Before I embark on any trip I feel opposing emotional states swell up within me. That day before I travel I feel this most keenly and I spend that entire day within the realms of liminality, making no attempt to “fix it” or bring my emotions into a single state of alignment.  I instead sit in this liminal space and explore the wonders of chaos.

I would describe myself as a hobbit, a creature from Middle Earth who loves the comforts of home. Generally, I like routine, I like knowing what I am doing and when I am doing it.  However, I am also gifted with tookish traits. In the Lord of the Rings the Tooks are a family of hobbits who are a bit disreputable as they are prone to having adventures.  So as well as feeling a longing for home I also have what The English translation of Herman Hesse’s book Knulp describes as “a homesickness for freedom.”

I carry a piece of every place I have ever been within me as well as a piece of everyone who has ever been important to me. Due to these encounters I changed, sometimes in a large way, sometimes in a quieter subtle way. I have been on a journey and I will not be the same again. When one arrives back following the journey you are then required to fit back into your old life.  That often involves making some inner adjustments as things cannot be the same, one has changed.  People around you won’t quite understand how you have changed and in terms of the subtler shifts may not even notice. The majority of one’s travel tales stay locked within your heart as people soon get fed up of hearing traveling tales on journey’s they were not a part of. The experience of lone travelling is to be alone and so is the reintegration into regular life. This aloneness strangely brings one into alignment with oneness, with the chaos that birthed all life. An interzone of connection and disconnection.

Many people say I am brave for frequently travelling on my own, but bravery is not the issue. The reason why I frequently travel alone is simply because I cannot wait for others to be ready to accompany me. When I made my first solo journey at the tender age of 20, I did so because I felt that if I waited on others I would be waiting forever and would never embark on the journey. The call to adventure was too strong to put off for the sake of a road buddy.  I would rather travel alone than not at all. I could not risk the possibility of reaching the age of 60 with unfulfilled childhood dreams, whose song rang so loudly in my ears that they could not be ignored or cast aside. That decision at the age of 20, set me up for a life of independence. If I want to do a thing I simply do it, without considering whether anyone is with me or not.

The traveller knows the value of the journey. Places such as Bus Stations, Air Ports; Ferry Terminals are places in flux, liminal spaces, neither in one place nor in the other. It is nowhere land. At a travel hub one is constantly moving, or waiting around for movement to occur. It’s a changeable space, between A and B, an ultimate threshold or crossroads where many people depart and arrive for many destinations.  A traveller feels the value of this transit experience. This can be seen in publications such as Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” This is not my favourite publication due to its sexism and it’s treating of females as unimportant or props for the men. It does nevertheless attempt to express the value of being in transit for influencing one’s mind space. I enjoy long journeys, in that space no one can really demand much from me and my mind is free to wander its highways and byways as the mode of transport takes me through highways and byways.  This liminality is a place where the self begins to open to something new; something different is taking its shape.

Travel is a bit sci-fi; while you are exploring outer space what’s really happening is that you’re exploring inner space. Your reactions to what you see around you tells one much about one self. It gives me information about my beliefs and values which is core to the practice of chaos magick.

Often paradigm shifting is thought to be working with different magical methodologies, such as doing a Norse ritual followed by a Greek ritual then followed by something else. A chaos magician may also stick with one paradigm for a period of time and then move onto another.  This is only one aspect of paradigm shifting. It goes deeper than that. Paradigm shifting is about delving deep into one’s self and questioning what you think you know; going as deep as the level of your core beliefs and the values that spring from it. I identify the call to travel with the call to initiation, a call for inner change, a call to enable ones paradigm to shift via the medium of exploring a new environment. The breaking down of ones conditioning to build oneself anew. Each place, each journey, is an initiation, leaving your old self behind and embracing something different.  This does not always have to be a wide sweeping change, it can be a subtler shift in the way you view the multiverse and ones place within it.

This is the reason why I feel the call to explore; it’s a call for the initiation of self. By challenging ones abilities such as physical abilities, abilities to manage unassisted in a different culture, transitioning between different states and modes of transport you’re also challenging your sense of self. You’re opening yourself up for change, giving yourself the opportunity to develop and become something more or something else.  This work of expanding one’s neuroplasticity enables one to experience that void, that core of Khaos, the great no thing that birthed the multiverse.

Carpe Diem.