Tourist or traveller
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) “Those who travel the world hoping to get blinded by the light are often blind to the light that’s all around them.” ― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (http://vagabonding.net)
You face a choice in how to incorporate life experiences into what you create.
You can do so either as a tourist or as a traveller.
The tourist is a sightseer: one who is forever comparing where they are now to how things worked back at home. They are preoccupied with the what of an experience, seldom the why. They believe their personal experiences on life’s journey are possessions, uniquely their own.
It is the safer choice.
And that’s why we are all prone to its seduction in the business of being creative.
The traveller seeks to accept experiences as they occur, much the way an unfamiliar road unfolds. Their journey is as long as it needs to be. The traveller doesn’t have many answers. But they work at asking better questions. Their experiences aren’t so much owned as encountered.
The distinction I’m drawing here extends beyond how we view our work and the present-day struggles that go into it.
The tourist and the traveller mindsets each have a different relationship to the past.
The tourist believes theirs shapes the present. And that informs how they create and how they feel.
The traveller believes that an understanding of the world is not static: that doubt can sometimes soften our rigid assumptions of both who and why we are.
In seeking to be a traveller in life and in what you do, be as mindful of how you explore as to what motivates your exploration. And to that end, I’ll close with with one more passage from Alan Watts:
“We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that… Just as the meaning of a sentence…you wait till later to find out what the sentence means.”
Very best, Patrick
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