Melvin McLeod: You write about travel as a transformative spiritual experience, even a spiritual practice. How do we approach travel in order to benefit from it spiritually?
Pico Iyer: I’ve always seen travel as a means of transformation. Part of its beauty involves not just leaving your home, but leaving far behind your habits and the self that you recognize at home. When you’re in a foreign place, you can’t define yourself in the ways you’re used to, and therefore there’s a chance to become a slightly different self.
I’m always seeking out those places that will overturn my assumptions, push me beyond what I think I know, and send me back a slightly different person from the one who left home. Of course, one doesn’t have to physically travel to be liberated from oneself, but it’s certainly a shortcut. If we’re in the streets of Varanasi, we can’t orient ourselves in familiar ways and we’re freed from our illusions of knowledge and of control.
The ways that travel humbles us are also the ways it releases us. When I’m at home, I’m living according to plan, trapped within my preconceptions. But put me down in Jerusalem, and reality is coming at me from all directions. Travel strips me of the comfortable notions I hide behind. It cuts through projections and illusions very quickly.
These days it’s so easy to get the world secondhand, through small screens and in two dimensions, so there’s a greater need than ever to encounter the world in all its confounding intensity.
For me, travel is a confrontation
