The Lost Art of Staying Put

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

Max and I stayed put in one place having the time of our lives for 13 plus years.  

Lucy Ellmann wrote this piece, The Lost Art of Staying Put in 2017 but yet even with COVID humans are incapable of sitting in one place quietly. This is a modern disease.

We are not talking about big governments nor big corporations. These are common people unleashing  tragedy of the commons at economies of scale. 

The crazy thing about this modern disease is that these common people are convinced that they are "poor" victims who work hard and "just" need a break. The core traits driving this insanity are self pity and pure signaling to up the number of places they visited in the name of "I love to travel". 

Animal suffering, ecological and biodiversity destruction, spreading disease, diminishing localized uniqueness (replaced by global chains), accelerating climate change, airlines delays - these are only the known suffering these "love to travel" common people unleash. There are tons of localized unknown sufferings which we cannot comprehend. 

Any country which depends on travel for their economic growth is always doomed to fail. A country cannot outsource their fundamental livelihood to the fantasy of people in other countries. 

Your reward is that you then must fly. During the airless, comfortless journey that follows (for which you more and more wondrously have to pay), amid air contaminated by engine oil and other toxic substances, you will also be at risk of radiation, congestion, constipation, nausea, dizziness, headaches, hypoxia, jet lag, flatulence, the flatulence of all (and I mean all) the people around you, deep vein thrombosis, fleas, bedbugs, and whooping cough. No one delays a flight because of illness anymore—that would be costly and cowardly. Instead, they leap on board in the service of their microbes, dutifully coughing, sniffing and exuding right next to you for hours. If you’re very unlucky, you may catch Ebola or TB while innocently trying to untangle your gratis audio set; to be capped by Montezuma’s revenge on arrival at your destination.

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Travel is killing as much culture as it spreads. Languages, dialects and accents die out whenever Cloaca-Cola, Pizza Hurt, and Brook No Brothers arrive. To ensure this, all major cities now offer the same chain hotels, stores and restaurants, the only acceptable receptacles for the unthinking on the move. But if Prada, Superdry, Nike, and H&M are everywhere, what the hell is the point in city-hopping shopping?

In her best book, The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler deals with the ardent belief of many American travelers that they can remain completely untouched by the places they visit. In Trump’s case, it seems highly possible: he takes his own steak supply everywhere he goes. My uncle from Birmingham, Michigan, would not visit anywhere in Europe that didn’t have a Holiday Inn, and spent his trips to England correcting the pronunciation of Birmingham. There is an American blind spot to other cultures that really gets in the way of deriving any discernible benefit from travel. So why go? Stay home and eat ham in Birmingham. And what’s with the sneakers, the raincoat, the Bermuda shorts, the camera, and the fanny-pack? Is it some kind of Pop Art joke? In this getup, Americans descend on foreign places like boulders, speaking in very loud voices and squashing flat any locals who get in the way.

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But you simply must see the Taj Mahal, pussycat, or Machu Picchu, or Outer Mongolia, before you peg out, we’re told again and again and again. All exotic places must be trampled immediately. It torments people to think of leaving a single one in peace. Just mention the Galapagos, or the Faroe Islands, and watch them jump—because they’ve got to get there before everyone else. Before it’s ruined. By people like them. The seagrass meadows of the oceans are disappearing at the rate of two football fields an hour, just so people can soak up the sun or bother a turtle in some unfamiliar hemisphere.

What’s the big deal? Locusts, too, have bucket lists. They, too, want to see the world before they die. The truth is you don’t personally have to survey every spot on earth, no matter what the reams of newspaper and magazine travel porn tell you. What is more important in all of this than reading Dickens? Humankind should be your business, not mass hypnosis.

If only people would stay home and read about foreign lands—that’s what books are for! But now every single work break, school break, birthday, divorce, death, bicycle accident, and basketball game have to be acknowledged (and drained of meaning) by a long, hazardous flight or drive somewhere. There are a million family occasions that require your presence—as if we all still lived in villages and the bris or graduation ceremony were only a block away. One blogger in the sad world of online airline fetishism flew with his wife from Houston to Frankfurt on his own nickel, just to try out United’s new Business Class perks. They probably flew straight back again afterward. “This flight was also special,” he claimed, “because my wife—who is an entrepreneurial coach—would become a United Million Miler. I can think of worse ways to celebrate.” I can’t.

A million new reasons to travel are manufactured every moment. Pageants, banquets, fairs, and jamborees. Courses for this, courses for that. You can, you must, attend a week of weaving, and maybe weeping, in Wales—or for the more myopic, a five-day dolls’-house furniture-making workshop. Or you might do a writing cruise; a hill-walking, pottery, juggling and watercolor course; a yoga, Pilates or karate retreat; a crash course in straw-hat manufacture, the I Ching, sock-knitting, croissant twisting; wildflower and mushroom differentiation; or even scything. Scything! What they need is a creative writhing course.

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The New York Times, hopelessly behind on the ethical travel fad, continues to pedal the wonders of Cornwall or India. But The Nation’s now offering $6,000 trips to Cuba, as if there’s something extra responsible or heartfelt involved in gadding about a country America tried to boycott out of existence. These do-gooding olive-branchers would presumably never dream of sacrificing six thousand bucks each to help Cuba.

Another popular destination for the conscience-stricken tourist is the European concentration-camp circuit. What a great day out for all the family! Sergei Loznitsa has covered this new leisure pursuit in his new movie, Austerlitz. The Nazis themselves put fossil fuels to previously unimaginable uses, and you too can use some up by (voluntarily) transporting yourself to Auschwitz to gawp at gas chambers in a Hawaiian shirt.

World-saving travel is one realm in which the means almost always defeat the ends. Apart from the opthalmologists who fly around Africa fixing cataracts (hoorah), and maybe a few UN or Peace Corps employees here and there (hard to verify), it’s time to consider the real possibility that there is no altruistic travel. Ever tried to save a stray cat or mistreated donkey in some foreign country? It’s not easy. They don’t have passports. No, your trip is much more likely to damage an animal. A young sniffer dog was shot dead at Auckland airport in New Zealand, for capering around loose on the runway, delaying flights. This is what you unwittingly commit to when boarding a plane: the diktat that all animals that threaten flight schedules will be executed (and not just to make beef medallions).

Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef dies for us. It’s eighty percent bleached already, cooked alive. You’d do more good if you would just stay put and use the cash to help somebody who hasn’t got any disposable income. In 1999, a friend of mine took his fiancée to Istanbul for a romantic tryst. They arrived just in time for the earthquake. He was moved to help dig people out; she wasn’t, and when they got home she dumped him. She hadn’t enjoyed twiddling her thumbs in the hotel while he was out being noble. That’s amore.

The wealthy-and-mobile 20 percent are causing most of the environmental damage in the world. As Bob Hughes observes in The Bleeding Edge, his book about the ways in which technological liberation has failed to liberate anybody, bikes and even horses are not only cleaner forms of transport, but quicker, if you calculate the actual time and energy invested. Airlines claim that ever-bigger aircraft are more egalitarian and environmentally friendly, but they never add in the costs of enlarging runways, building the damn things, and hiring enough goons to flatten all those passengers—I mean, to protect passenger safety.

So there’s nothing admirable about getting your ass on an Airbus. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, George Monbiot says long-distance travel should be accomplished slowly, if at all. We should all try walking those love miles.

Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic The Irony of American History captured these traits brilliantly

Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.

Pretrial Detention

It’s possible, of course, that the people who are sentenced to serve time are more likely to commit crime in the first place — in other words, maybe they get put behind bars precisely because judges recognize that they are a crime risk. That could explain the small increased likelihood that a person will commit future crimes after spending time behind bars. To tackle this question, Loeffler and his Annual Review coauthor Daniel Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, collected a set of 13 carefully designed studies looking at court systems that did things differently: They randomly assigned criminal cases to judges within the court (in other court systems, case assignment isn’t random). If the future crime rate ended up lower for people sentenced by lenient judges than by judges who sent more people to jail, it would be clear evidence that time in jail — not any quality within the criminals themselves — was making the difference.

When Loeffler and Nagin combed through the data, though, they found that the recidivism rate — the rate of future crime — was generally similar for the cases decided by lenient judges and those decided by more punitive judges. In other words, spending time in jail didn’t increase crime, but it didn’t decrease it either.

Loeffler and Nagin’s analysis did turn up a specific situation where incarceration was consistently linked to an increased likelihood of committing a crime in the future: pretrial detention. This is when people who have been accused of a crime are held in jail while they are awaiting trial. In the US, more than 400,000 people are awaiting trial in jail at any given time.

The finding was preliminary, Loeffler stresses, and more research is needed to confirm the effect. But the data suggest that people held in jail before trial have a higher likelihood of committing crime after their release than people who remain in the community before trial.

It’s not surprising that pretrial detention would have a crime-promoting effect, says Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a research analyst at the Sentencing Project, an advocacy organization working to end mass incarceration. Some people held pretrial are innocent or have committed only low-level offenses that wouldn’t earn a jail sentence, yet they experience the negative effects of incarceration while awaiting trial.

“Holding them for a couple days, a couple months pretrial has devastating implications for their lives,” Ghandnoosh says. Many find it hard to keep a job, hard to keep their housing. Such outcomes for a minor offense or no offense at all, she says, makes it more difficult to live a law-abiding life and could tip people into crime.

Pretrial detention is especially concerning because it disproportionately affects poor people. While wealthier people can typically post bail to get out of pretrial detention, people in poverty can’t. Pretrial detention also has lopsided impacts on people of color: Black and Latino defendants are more likely to be denied bail or to have their bail set at a higher amount.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Before that day, I had always thought that I needed to be somebody in the world. That rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life by Boyd Varty.

What a book!! I never know Lion tracking is a profession leave alone that one can learn immensely from it. Talk about realities of life right under the nose but yet we aren't aware of it. 

Thank you Boyd Varty for penning your experiences in the beautiful book. 

• That’s how mentors should be made: not through titles or words but through actions. On the ground, in the face of a leopard, one feels acutely alone. To be guided in a moment like that, with such extreme stakes, creates a bond that is rare in modern life. 

• Unlike modern men who have been taught to live in competition, Renias lives in profound relation with his surroundings.  

• Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death.  

• I transition from endless doing into a steady being.  

• Trackers try things. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid. He relies on a process of elimination, inquiry, conformation; a process of discovery and feedback. He enters a ritual of focused attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. Alex and Renias call this "the path of not here." No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. The path of not here is part of the path of here.  

• The core of coaching does have a powerful central premise: you beliefs about life are not a reality. A great coach asks you to question your deeply held beliefs and rules for yourself. You can go only as far into the experience of creating life as the limits of your personal belief system will allow.  

• If you never left a place, you may never know how deeply it has gone into your cells. Only in its absence, a world away in another land, would you hear its song calling back to you, playing the music of your longing.  

• The tracker reimagines the hypothesis based on new evidence. He then does what scientists who have studied tracking call "speculative deductive tracking." 

• In truth I am done. I could go home now and be happy. I hear Joseph Campbell: "People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive." If that was it, I found it.  

• Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track. Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest. Fin the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus. Live deeply in your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. 

The miracle is not walking on water; the miracle is walking on the earth. The miracle is all around us as the awareness of life itself. 

- Thich Nhat Hahn

And the final thoughts from Boyd: 

You must become a tracker and set out on the trail of your wild life. If you track your authentic life and uncover its meaning, it will catalyze other possibilities for living, and what's important to you will immediately change. Meaning doesn't want more; when you're in deep touch with your wild self, you know you have enough and are enough. From that place of enough, you act in service, because that's what feeds you. It's a lot of individuals going on that journey of discovery that will create transformation. 

Remember to prepare for the call. Know the call when it comes by the fact that not doing it would feel profoundly wrong. Open yourself to the unknown. Develop your track awareness. Amidst all of the information that surrounds us, learn to see what is deeply important to you. Use the feelings in your body as a guide. Live on the first tracks. 

Anything that puts you into your essence, no matter how small, is valuable. Even if you don't know where it's going, play with it. Find friends to track with, lose the track, keep trying things, get feedback. Find your flow and remember to see how many unexpected things come into your life by living this way. It will be scary at times. Let the fear bring you to life. I suspect that if you give yourself the room to live each day as a tracker, a deep calling to serve will emerge. 

On Human Passion For Reductionism

"First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you couldn't survive." Religion, science, politics and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new complexities. "Lots of people have been killed, in political wars. I mean, certain opinions are not liked." Feyerabend, I realized, was talking about the quest for The Answer, the secret to the riddle of reality.

But The Answer will forever remain beyond our grasp, according to Feyerabend. He ridiculed the belief of some scientists that they might someday reduce reality to a single theory. "Let them have their belief, if it gives them joy. Let them also give talks about that. 'We touch the infinite!' And some people say"--bored voice--"Ya ya, he says he touches the infinite.' And some people say"--thrilled voice--"'Ya ya! He says he touches the infinite!' But to tell the little children in school, 'Now that is what the truth is,' that is going much too far."

All descriptions of reality are inadequate, Feyerabend said. "You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it all out? This to me seems so crazy! It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! 'Ha ha! They think they have found me out!'"

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Beneath Feyerabend's rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized--and was horrified by--science's vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals.

- More here on Paul Feyerabend