Journey
Learned Vol. 6, Issue 19
The hardest part about coming home is actually coming home.
By which I mean the actually moving about part. In my case, it starts with a drive from my hometown to a bigger city with a bigger airport - usually L.A., sometimes Phoenix or San Diego; every once in a great while San Jose or Las Vegas. And while driving in America is not arduous, it's not exactly fun either. Especially considering that arriving at the airport is just the end of the beginning.
If just getting to the airport is the long, slow climb up to the top of the first arc of the roller coaster, everything from parking to getting to your gate is the mad rush down the other side: make sure you're in the right line for the right parking area at the right terminal. Get a cart and tetris your suitcases until they all fit on it. Then push it while corralling children, parents, significant others, friends, and assorted companions. Get to the terminal building. Figure out which floor departures are on. Get an elevator. Or two. Or three.
Do you need to check-in? Why didn't you do it online? Do you have your passport, your frequent flier login, neatly written luggage tags? Have you packed your own suitcases? Can I see your passport one more time? Here, you're all checked in.
All that just to get to the security shuffle. Take off your shoes, your belt, your pants, your socks, your wedding ring, your glasses, your dignity and place your hands on these circles then step through the gate. Once more please.
Now wait. Ah, your plane's delayed. I guess that's just another chance to go wander through all the shops and wonder if one more slice of pizza will kill you mid-flight.
Now spend the next twelve hours in the air.
The seat is comfortable for the first 45 minutes. Then the idiot in front of you reclines his so far that you're left no choice but to bash into it every time you get up to stretch which you'll do more and more frequently as the flight progresses. And everytime you get up you pause the crappy movie you've already seen a dozen times and wonder why you bother.
Finally, you've made it to the other side and now, instead of security, there's immigration and customs and baggage claim. And once you're through all that...well, if you're me, there's another three hour drive before you can sink into the warm embrace of your own bed.
All in all, it's quite the journey.
This summer, I took a trip to the States. I travelled back to the States. I journeyed to the States. My travels saw me return to my hometown. I tripped along the highways and byways and alit in my own backyard...okay, that's a bit too poetic, even for me. But I've been thinking about journey and all its near-synonyms for a minute.
One of the things I noticed on this trip back to the States was the increased use of journey to mean a path of betterment. Everyone's on a weight-loss journey or a financial journey or a house-renovation journey or even a spiritual journey. This use of journey is not particularly new; Merriam-Webster lists "the journey from youth to maturity" as an example usage of journey before it gets around to anything as mundane actually moving in physical space.
That said, the earliest entry I could find for any of the phrases mentioned above is in the Corpus of Historical American English, which includes mentions of spiritual journey all the way back in 1981. Meanwhile, changing to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, weight-loss journey1 is from 1995, while financial journey dates to 2012. So journey, it seems is becoming a little bit less literal than it used to be. Then again, the hero’s journey, arguably ground zero for describing one’s metaphorical path dates back to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949.
Historically, a journey meant the distance one could travel in a day. In other words, if you were walking all day you journeyed from point A to point B. Which makes my own journey home more of a classical journey than I had realized. To me, a journey was a long, arduous, and perhaps even dangerous trip. Blame movies and stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and Journey to the West. But, what I mean is, in my long journey from the U.S. to Japan, I took less than a day to travel halfway around the world.
While thinking about all this, I asked Chat GPT for help differentiating journey from its synonyms. It wrote:
Journeys can be both physical and metaphorical. For example, someone might refer to their educational journey or a spiritual journey, which are not necessarily about physical travel but personal development2.
At any rate, my journey back to my house has concluded. There are lots of new memories and souvenirs tucked into the walls and shelves of my house. It’s good to be back.
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Not much, to be honest. I’m still too wiped out from traveling. So, in lieu of a single book, I’m going to just link to three of my favorite travel books. Here you go:
Interestingly, Google's Ngram Viewer shows "weight-loss journey" as early as 1986.
I really want to know what data it was trained on to come up with that answer. Remember, the bot doesn’t actually know anything. It’s merely putting words it doesn’t understand in a sequence it thinks I want.
I think to me journey is more about those small moments that you zoom in and then zoom out as a whole from point A to B. Infinitesimal and Cosmic both are journeys.
I am liking your storytelling style though.