Let us draw these lessons from the foregoing remarks: to keep one’s desires within bounds means to assure one’s spiritual health. Inordinate ambition, which foolish parents kindle in their children’s hearts, is often the cause of an early breakdown. We must school ourselves and our children to wish only for the attainable and to attain our desires. Our ideals must live in our breasts, not in the outer world. Then we may find in ourselves what the world denies us. They who can find refuge in their health will escape having to take refuge in disease.
WHY WE TRAVEL
Why do we not know why we travel? Haven’t we the imperative obligation to recuperate? Does not our malady enforce a trip to a health resort? Are we not thirsty for new countries, new people, a new environment?
Peace! peace! No, we do not know! Or rather, we do not wish to know. Naturally, we always have a few superficial motives at our disposal when it suits us to mask our unconscious secrets from ourselves and from the world. Why do we travel? Psychologists have given many reasons, but they do not go beyond such superficial motives as “the desire for a change,” “a craving for excitement,” “curiosity,” “fatigue, the need for a rest,” “flight from the home,” etc. Some go further and attribute the desire to travel to the elementary pleasure of being in motion. For these psychologists the little child’s first step is its first journey, the last step of the weary aged their last journey. Others again veritably classify journeys and distinguish between trips undertaken for health reasons, business trips, scientific trips, etc.
Vain beginning! In reality one trip is like another. If we would understand the elementary feelings associated with a trip we must go back to our youth. In youth we still have a sense of the wonderful; in youth the horizon of our fantasies is aglow with wondrous visions. But of course the world about us is solemn and wearisome, full of duties and obligations. But ah, the wide world without! There dangerous adventures smile alluringly; there unrestrained freedom beckons; there deeds may be achieved that may make kings of us. In our thoughts we build a small skiff that will take us out of the narrow channel of our homes into the vast sea; we battle on the prairie with the brave and crafty Indians; we seek out the sun-burned gold-fields in the new world; we put a hurried girdle round about the earth, and—when at top speed—we would even attempt a flight to the moon.
Nothing that makes an impression on the human mind is ever lost. Our youth with its fantasies and childish desires exerts an important influence on us all our life. Henceforth all our excursions are journeys into the realm of youth. All, all are alike. Life hems us in with innumerable obstacles, bonds, and walls. The older we grow the greater becomes the weight that loads us down. In the depths of the soul the tintinnabulation of youth is ringing and speaking to us of life and freedom, and keeps on ringing alluringly till weary man surrenders and takes a trip. The tinkling music of the soul works strongest on the mind of youth. He, fortunate he, knows not the difference between the music of his heart and the hum of the world without. He knows not yet that the world is everywhere the same, the people everywhere the same, and the mountains, the lakes, the seas, with but slight variations, the same. His longings carry him out, far out, and he seeks their fulfilment.
The adult lives a life of bitter disappointments. He never seeks the new. He longs only to get rid of the old. And the aged wanderer, having reached the end of the vale of life, follows his buried wishes, his memories of the beautiful days in which there was still something to hope for, in which he was not beyond self-deception.