This afternoon I boarded a flight in Berlin. About an hour or so later I landed in London.
We think nothing of it these days, but that’s pretty incredible. This morning I was sitting in my kitchen in Berlin, drinking coffee, writing Tweets and answering email. Now I’n sitting in London writing this.
A tale of two cities.
I go to Berlin a lot—I live there half the time—so perhaps this is not the best trip to use as an example, but I found myself wondering whether travel really does broaden the mind like they say it does.
Yes, of course, if you go to see the Taj Mahal, or Machu Picchu or something then your mind will necessarily be broadened since you are taking in new sights sounds, sensations and surroundings which you have never encountered before.
But how about the act of travelling itself? The hanging out in airports. The going through international borders. The sitting in planes. The boredom, the fatigue, the discomfort, the frustration. The minutiae. Does that broaden the mind?
Probably not, you might say. But I’m not so sure. I have a love-hate relationship with air travel in particular.
I love getting to places relatively quickly.
I hate all of the security and messing around it entails.
But there’s something about airports that I quite like. For a start they are places that always seem exciting, promising escape as they do.
But there is more to it than that. I like their spotless, faceless interiors, punctuated only by those well-known brands—Rayban, Harrods, Zara, Ted Baker, and so on—that lull me into a feeling of safe nothingness with their familiarity and through the bland friendliness of their advertising.
I like the anonymity of travel. Yes of course, you’re not really anonymous, since you have people asking to see your passport every five minutes, but you know what I mean. To the rest of the crowd at the airport I could be anyone. No-one knows who I am or gives a damn. And that’s fantastic. You enter into this automated, conveyor-belt process where you deliberately surrender your individuality for a bit and become just another traveller.
There’s something incredibly soothing about that, somehow. And coupled with the feeling of melancholy I always seem to experience post-flight, plus the long time that I have for reflection, I usually return home filled with ideas after even a brief trip.
So irksome as it is, travel (in its purest form) can broaden the mind. Or at least, it can broaden the creative capacity of the mind by setting it free to wander for a period, which is pretty much the same thing.
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