Travel expands what was always possible

I don’t know how to do what I’m doing, but I have to keep doing it. That’s the thought that comes to mind on the coast of Japan. I am shivering on a tiny wooden stool, in a bathing room with five women whose language I do not speak. It’s the first time I’ve encountered the Japanese bathing experience, and I am not sure how to do it correctly. That feeling of awkwardness, and the state of vulnerability that comes with travel, surely prompts the above thought, but when it arrives, it is a sweeping feeling about life, about writing, about this blog and its podcasts, about being a philosopher, about the vastness in which all this is just a spark. It moves before me like the pine green sea, and I ease into it.

—

Onsen is the word I learn that day. Onsen are the hot springs and baths found in some traditional inns of Japan. I was not expecting to have this experience, so I’ve done little research into proper etiquette. I try to gather information but the internet connection is unstable. Leaving my belongings behind, I resign to figuring things out as they come. Letting go of my phone, my clothes, my ability to communicate—all this leads me towards that delicate opening whereby old currents surface.

Long colorful robes have been set out for each guest. These robes have been pressed and folded more perfectly than I’ve ever pressed or folded anything. I am not sure how to tie their blood-orange belts. I do my best, feeling patience and order in the fabric.

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A few days ago, someone asked me: why do you do what you do? why open space around worlds that do not fit? My answer comes here: I do this because I don’t know how to do it, and because I’m compelled. I’m compelled because of what I do know. I know that we are beings with potentials we have yet to sense. I know the threshold of potency is love, and that we have no idea how deep it is yet. To begin, you sail beyond yourself. The real voyage of discovery is not about seeking new landscapes but about remembering the future.*

—

I slide open the wooden door to the women’s bathing area and look for instructions. Part of one sign has been translated into English: Please take off your underwear and slippers and enter the bathing area. Please do not bring a camera or smartphone. Please pour warm water on your body and wash your body well before taking a bath...

I remove my shoes and put on the straw sandals provided, then enter the women’s changing room. For an American, the idea of washing your body before bathing sounds as strange as it does here to take a bath without washing first. The bath is a meditative, calming experience. You must be clean before the spring water touches you.

I do as instructed, leaving my robe in a locker and entering the main bathing area through another set of doors. I know I am supposed to wash, but where? As soon as I step through the doors, I see a half moon of elegant tables, low to the ground, built into the structure as if they’ve formed naturally from the stone upon which I walk barefoot. I sit on one of the small stools in front of what my grandmother would call ‘a vanity table’ and look at myself in its mirror. I scan the arrangement of tidy products and try to figure out which to use. A movable shower head hooks neatly nearby. I glance to the other women from the corner of my eye and learn from them, pulling the shower head from its nook and turning the water on. There is a little wooden bucket that I hold in my lap. I place the shower head in it when I lather, allowing the excess water to pool. Everyone seems to be watching, but nobody looks.

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Later that night, I dream of a friend I haven’t seen in years. Once, long ago, we’d been by the shore together on the other side of the world. Back then, I’d told him what felt like a secret. Sometimes I look at the sea and imagine the ocean is my life; any worry I have is just one little boat in the vastness.

I was young when I said that. Today the ocean feels smaller. I’m more aware of the land on all sides. I seem to have sailed everywhere. In the dream, he laughs at how much I’ve missed. I wake up and write: land is the ocean underneath, just as underneath the ocean, there is land. This feels like a long satin blanket. As I drift back to sleep, I’m not sure whether I wrote ocean or onsen.

—

I think of the work of a philosopher named Hanne. I think: loving is knowing at its pinnacle, and at its core. I’m frustrated because this is true and yet means more than I write.

Knowing is the preparation we do for loving, so we can sit still for a moment, up to our neck in its warmth. We sit naked on the stool and we wash. We watch our reflection steam over in the mirror. Then we step towards the bath.

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Many days and nights of my youth were spent looking from the windows of bookshops where I worked. Some days, I’d imagine I was looking out the porthole of a ship, cruising through the stories of the East Village, or Capitol Hill and Pioneer Square. One of the people who worked with me sometimes came into the store after he’d been meditating at the Zen Center. He practiced with a sweet seriousness that gave him the feeling of fresh rain. The wave is free when it realizes it is part of the ocean, he once said.

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Before traveling out to sea, I went to a bookshop in the Jimbocho district of Tokyo. Later, in Kyoto, I visited Zen temples and found the philosopher’s walk from Nanzen-ji to Ginkaku-ji. I ate matcha ice cream. The sun was strong. It was too late for cherry blossoms. I felt the edge of the book I bought bumping against my back as I walked. In the dream, I remember, I kept saying book when I meant boat.

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Life is the ocean, I tell the one who has asked. It is the land and I am the sea. This is the boat and I am the friend who dreams of pine trees. Every conversation, I’m still traveling. Every book is another body of water set sail to a country I cannot name. Every life is a way to listen to what has always been possible. It would be a pity to miss what you cannot know.

*to paraphrase Proust

This is a ‘calibration’ and goes with the conversation I had with Kevin Kelly where we talked about the power of travel and the many meanings of landscapes. You can find that conversation and its QED Summary here.