The commencement of the dream travels of trouble

Last week could be said to be the commencement of the dream travels of Trouble. The travels began five or so years ago. But the terrain of travel has changed. When I told some of our students of traveling in the Middle East from Cairo to Beirut to Damascus to Aleppo and on to Constantinople aka Istanbul, they were surprised.

Today, another city is being built to replace Cairo because Cairo has become impossible. Beirut is a closed down capital of Lebanon, country of the poet Khalil Gibran, a country that has not being able to have a government in a year or so. Damascus? A ten year civil war has just ended and there is still no settlement. Aleppo is half destroyed. Istanbul’s government wants to expel 10 ambassadors at one fell swoop. Can anyone hick-hike in such a world today as I was able to do in 1971?

The world of travel has changed. The means of travel has changed. The only constant means of travel is our Footwagen or Wakadeygo. And finally, the traveler has changed.

The world of travel has changed as the world has changed. Fire burns without end where fire wants to burn. Rainfall without end drowning built and unbuilt environment. And where neither fire nor rain reaches drought grips the land and squeezes out the seed that would grow. And most scary of all, the world temperature is rising. If it rises by 1 percent Celsius the seas and oceans that surround our living land area will take over some inches of land. Thus small island-nations would lose land that was not enough in the first place. For these reasons some island-nations have begun to learn how to live inside water. Like fishes and crabs, amphibiously. Other human beings are thinking of interplanetary travels that would settle humans on Mars. Getting to destination takes more than one life time. Can you imagine what answer we would give to the simple question: are we there yet?

Perhaps, we need a more detailed study of the royal butterfly whose DNA changes for the ones flying down to the hot weather. They get longer lives than the ones arriving to live for a while. How that would work is in the hands of the Future.

As the world of travel has changed, so has the means of travel changed. To look at cities today you would think they were built to park vehicles on their highways. Different architectural solutions have been applied and each of them has exhausted its possibility. Some cities are attempting other means of travel within the city as well as outside the city. Other solutions being applied seem to suggest that we must live where we work. What about seeing our relations? Must we live where they live? And our friends, to see them, we must live where they live? Our markets would be where our every need exists. But there would always be the need to cover distances impossible to cover by wakadeygo. Hence the development of single one occupation transportation such as walking, bicycling, skateboarding, pod cars, two-wheel cycles, and what else?

Given the laws that govern jaywalking, it is the poor of the poor who need wakadeygo transport systems and they are the ones who get penalized for walking. It is possible to say that mass transport is still the thinking of those who think of solving the problem of locomotion in and out of cities.

The laws governing transport will have to be changed. The cost of transport will have to come down to earth.

What if the traveler has changed? One of the joys of traveling later in life was arriving at a city where once one was prevented from entering. Coming now to be met in the same city by ambassadors and representatives of the city and the country. But changes overcome the traveler. Old age and illness are possibilities. But what of pandemic which has not been an item that wounded traveling so much. The last thirty months of human existence on this earth has been a real traitor for travel. In order for the disease not to spread, human beings must not congregate. If they must they must arrange themselves according to our agriculture teachers used to teach us to plant some seeds in the school farm: six feet apart and three feet staggered!

Nobody travels that way. It is impossible inside aero planes. The economic implications are still to be worked out. There needs to be a continuous global prayer for safety from global illness.

There is no illness that belongs to the ill person alone. You are ill, and your community is ill with you. And when you are well everybody is well with you. This is why they say you must say you are well for your community to accept to be well with you.

When the world we live in is one in which the illness must come before the medical researchers find the cure for it, are we not in trouble? We are in trouble that medication must cure. And as we have seen ideas of ancient times have come back to call to question the ordinariness of our illnesses. To have to begin to regret our refusal to take medication just put together at the hour of our death is not befitting of a human being with human dignity. To have boasted that nothing can happen only for something to declare its happiness is to die in disgrace.

So, this generation we shall also survive. It is the period of dream trouble or trouble dream. The traveler is down. His dreams are the travel dreams of the cripple: There is dance in the limbs of the cripple. There is style in movement possibilities of the fellow with no arms, no legs. There are miraculous dexterity in the absent movement of our wished for sound and sense. There must reside in us the ultimate triumph of our travel dreams. The travel world of change, the change of the travel means and the change of the traveler must make for an incredible travel dreams.