something like remembering
On the parts of travel that are immune to artificial intelligence
The below is a gumbo of personal memory and photography from my time living and working in Myanmar (Burma) in the early 2010’s. It is also an attempt to raise the parts of travel that are independent and immune to new technologies, the parts that are outside of mathematics and measurables, parts that are inefficient yet felt.
“Lost as a damn easter egg.” That kept passing through my mind as I wandered the village looking for a place to sleep. The anthropological map of Myanmar is lit up with colours like a Pollock painting. I was in the Pa-O Kingdom in the Shan Hills on the eastern side of Inle Lake, and I had no place to sleep for the night. I had a map, but it was hand drawn and passed down and I was not sure what village I was in, didn’t speak the language and the sun was getting close to the rolling green Shan hills. There was a temple and a monastery on the top of a peak and as I walked towards the property a monk came out and through body language and common human feel I could tell I would be taken in and housed for the night, and forever if I had wanted.
Kindness; this is one of the things that can’t be generated artificially in no matter how many data centres we build. It can be mimicked, and acted out, but to be true heartfelt compassion from living organic matter, empathy, well that is a horse of a different colour.
I have always felt that travel is, or can be, a kind of backdoor diplomacy. And that as long as it is safe, going to a place to see it for yourself and to interact with people and place is the best way to judge for yourself what might be there. Going to places that are on the fringes of being understood or misunderstood, takes the going and talking and laughing and crying with the people in those places. It allows for relating and communing rather than consuming and feeding. There are moments of euphoria and moments of stillness, both intrinsically valuable to understanding. These aren’t vacations, these are a dialectic, and it is an activity we are losing the capacity for; attention and patience. There are many reasons for the loss of these skills, and that isn’t what I am talking about here. I am talking about what we can do to get better, techniques through a certain way of travel and curious openness, diplomatic, and slow, and indirect.
This takes something like remembering, because we seem to be forgetting these days. Remembering what’s at stake, remembering what we have the capacity and ability to achieve, together. Remembering what’s important, priorities. Remembering how to be and how to connect. Remembering how to let go of some false sense of control painted as a scroll, a like, a swipe.
The act of traveling, of moving through space and time and interacting with place and people, helps remind us, it helps us trust, it brings something back into conscious awareness. It shakes the cage and opens the windows. The experience of being there is different from the way it is presented before you go. It takes the going to feel it and know it. You can plan and look at lists, and ask advice, and wish and hope that you see and do this and that, but the real activity is in the doing, and if you do it right, there are parts of travel that are immune to both artificialness and faux intelligence. There are parts that are worlds away from google searches, or QR codes, or binary systems. Here are a few more to add to Kindness, ideas that I conjure when I move about this wonderful confused world of ours.
