direct experience

from travels, by michael crichton

i see my travels as a strategy for solving problems in my life. whenever things got bad, whenever things in my life werent working, id get on a plane and go far away. not to escape my problems so much as to get perspective on them. i found that this strategy worked. i returned to my life with a new sense of balance. i was able to get to the point, to know what i wanted to do and how to go about doing it. i was focused and effective.

in every instance, it was because i had gone away and found out something about myself. something i needed to know.

my own sense is that the acquistion of self-knowledge has been made more difficult by the modern world. more and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings. the natural world, the traditional source of self-awareness, is increasingly absent.

furthermore, within the last century we have come to live increasingly in a compelling world defined by electronic media. the media have evolved a pace that is utterly alien to our true natures.

and i think that this constant assualt has made us pliable in a certain unhealthy way. cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.

unaccustomed to direct experience, we can come to fear it. we dont want to read a book or see a museum show until we've read the reviews so that we know what to think. we lose confidence to percieve ourselves. we want to know the meaning of an experience before we have it.

we become frightened of direct experience, and we will go to elaborate lengths to avoid it.

i found i liked travel, becasue it got me out of my routines and my familiar patterns.