Daily Meditation

2
On the traveling road, I can feel the weight of my soul.
It allows me to reflect upon my own inner face,
how I live within all of life's situations.
Traveling is no simple hobby,
it is a rigorous journey of regulating oneself,
an opportunity to rediscover the significance of life.
It is also practice for bidding farewell to this world.
--Beop Jeong ("A Though a Day")

(I have long lived by the principle that traveling is one of the greatest things to do on the planet--if only because there is a planet to travel around on (echoes of "Don't end your sentences with prepositions?). At any rate, traveling is simultaneously one of the most challenging and rewarding things a body can engage themselves in because it forces you to renew your outlook on yourself every time you come into contact with new people or a new place. That is the "inner face." You see yourself when others see you, and you see yourself (probably) more clearly when new people see you. People that have a history with you will see you tinted by that history, tinted by the way they want to see you, and tinted with the hues of whatever else they might know about you. New people will consistently judge you differently and force you to recognize yourself in a new way. There is absolutely something to be said for the comfort that is conferred by those that know you and know you well, but I think you would be hard pressed to find anybody who has truly had a "comfortable" life. Life is a challenge. It moves and changes. In a way, you could say that traveling mirrors human reality. We are constantly on the move from pure consciousness to object and back again: subject, object, subject, object. We are forever in motion, and traveling in the physical waking reality is sense is simply the manifestation of what we're doing internally. Traveling, I think, ought to be further refined to take on a kind of Spartan sentimentality (in the "sparse" sense), and leave the luxurious four-star amenities at home. We're talking here about moving and finding your way, not calling ahead and reserving a room. Traveling ehre is stepping into the unknown. People often say they are "trying to find themselves," and they usually do, but what they don't realize is that the reason they find themselves is the trying, not where they look. It is the seeking that is important, not the place itself.)