(Reading time: 4 minutes)
The concept of traveling is fundamentally simple. It involves the process of moving a person from a place they consider their home to a place others consider their home, but not the person in transit. Distance doesn’t matter; for the basic definition, we consider it an unnecessary indicator. It only serves as a means to demonstrate the expanding possibilities for individuals and, by extension, for society as a whole.
In one scenario, an adventurer from a village climbs a hill to see what’s on the other side because he heard that there’s a dragon beyond it. The truth is much more mundane—there’s just another village beyond the hill, and from it, a settler is also heading up to the top, where he meets the adventurer. Their sense of home will evolve in the future. Before their exploratory journey, they considered only their village or settlement as their home. When they return to their families, they’ll recount their encounter with the stranger—now a neighbor—and over time, their sense of home will come to include the village, the hilltop, and the settlement alike. All of these places are where they feel safe, where “their” people live, where everyone works for their own interest and that of future generations, so that life is good today, and will be good tomorrow. During urbanization, the village and the settlement will merge, the hill will become a city park, but initially, they were three independent points, unaware of each other’s existence.
A delegation of two people, a man and a woman, traveled on Earth in ancient times. According to the Kardashev scale used back then, humanity had not yet even reached the level of a planetary civilization, yet it managed to build machines that could transport them by air halfway around the planet in half of the Earth’s standard rotation speed. The mountains had already been conquered, settlements became villages, villages turned into cities, and those grew into metropolises.
Traveling also underwent evolution. The element of moving into complete unknowns disappeared. The delegation knew that their metallic bird would carry them by air from the Old Continent to the neighbors of the Land of the Rising Sun. Skepticism about whether the flying machine might fall from the sky was part of expanding their comfort zone during those journeys. Additionally, historical circumstances meant that the destination city, known in the past as Hanyang, was situated on a peninsula almost inaccessible by land. In the first scenario, there was no fierce creature beyond the hill, but in this story, the northern side of the peninsula was home to a malevolent enemy, preventing the south from connecting to the rest of the continent by land.
Once you visit a new place repeatedly, it stops being new, and even the element of “moving to a place you don’t consider your home” can disappear from traveling. This process is neither immediate nor obligatory—the delegation itself only experienced it in a few locations where they had been before, and déjà vu brought a pleasant feeling of a “home-like” environment in a foreign country. This is how the boundaries between foreign and familiar, distant and close, disappear. There might be no difference between the village beyond the hill and the far side of the Moon; traveling then becomes a simple transfer from one home-like point to another. However, the delegation was more interested in exploratory travel. Their renewed experiences in Hanyang reminded them of the time they first had those experiences and the reason they initially left their homeland.
Someone might discourage them with words like, “You have no idea what could be beyond that next hill. Don’t risk it. It’s better to stay here. On the road, you might be killed. It’s better to face known dangers.”, but the truth is that beyond the hill, there are simply other people with their homes. It might not be yours, but you can still feel comfortable there, and the known danger only becomes known after you’ve faced it.
-mj-
