TRAVEL! (Third Edition)

It might be strange that I keep returning to this TRAVEL! emphasis. Who likes beating dead horses, other than Hollywood producers? And yet the third edition of my travel advocacy (Words, Words, Words was just updated last week for the fourth time) is not a continued harping on the fact that yes, travel is good and formative. I’m coming to understand, more than I did at the beginning, that TRAVEL! has become about how travel is good and formative. And that focus lends itself to a bounty of new angles and updated understandings.

This time around, I want to examine how travel has led me to keep a journal. Two journals, actually; one gray and one black. The gray was filled by September 5th, a few days after I arrived in Dublin. I had maintained daily page-or-two pace all through the summer, and when the pages could hold no more I moved into the first line of the black notebook. The journals began early, back in May. With the lessened summer schedule, I figured I could work to build up the discipline to journal in Ireland. And discipline best describes the summer journaling: at night before bed, or in the mornings over groggy coffee, trying to unspool the previous day was a chore. Maybe work was uneventful. Maybe studying was demoralizing. Either way, the page demanded to filled. This was for Ireland, after all, for that island where surely the events would come nonstop in clouds of wonder and excitement. Like any discipline, progress was slow and unrewarding until the habit at last settled into my days.

Ireland came, and I was ready to document it. Rather, I was ready to reflect on it. Over the course of the summer I did not become a “and then and then and then” journal-keeper, but a little bit thoughtful, a little too stagnantly wordy. Writing is generally better in a narrative, but most days are not stories to tell around a fire. Accordingly, I wade through the thoughts, reactions, and feelings—yes, I do have one or two of those—which the day brought on. It has become important to me, beneficial even.

Journal-keeping as a feature of travel gives me the room to sort through myself. As a young man and student I often have conflicting things I would want to say. A blank page for my pen lets me divide the stupidity from the significant; there is so much more of the first than the second. Putting it all in black-and-white helps to unwind me, deflate the big fat head I’d love to give myself. No, your faulty bike lock will not give you an ulcer. Yes, trying that beer was in fact stupid. Yes, you are more blessed than ever before. No, it is not great to sit on a train alone. Transcribing my mind onto actual paper helps simplify, and I can cut everything down to size.

On top of the mental spring-cleaning, keeping my journal has forced me to pay the closest attention to every place that I visit. If I want to remember Dublin one day through the journal it has filled, then I have to be attentive to where I am, who I’m with, and what I’m doing. A street can’t be just a street; it has to be Synge, or maybe Camden. A new pub is never unnamed; it has to be the Black Swan (Limerick) or the Clubhouse (UCD). I’ll probably never make it in journalism, but the concrete facts of my life help it last on the page. And if the day is to be a story, then I can’t afford to miss any of it. That means keeping my eyes up so that I can have access to all the details. On the bus, on the train, maybe even in class. Watching, like the journal, also has to be learned. Who knew?

On the way to Howth a few weeks back, I propped my journal on my knee and tried to finish up the previous day. An older man, seated across the aisle, made eye contact as he sat with his wife. No words, though. He waited until they stood to leave, and then said, “Good to see you writing paragraphs. Is it a story?” His accent was politely English.

I mean, in a manner of speaking. “It’s a journal,” I said. “Just for while I’m here.” He smiled on his way out the sliding doors, like that was the correct answer. All while I realized for the first time how strange it might actually be to keep a journal. To record and reflect in a place other than your own head. The journals, by way of traveling, have made me an oddball that way.

It could be too late now to admit that writing about writing is a bit much. Like opening the blinds to brilliant sunshine and then flipping on all the overhead lights on top of it. But travel has been instrumental to how I write about the Irish experiment, and I need to reflect on that. By the way: the first two sentences of this paragraph are word for word from a journal entry three weeks ago. See? Those pages support these ones.