how do our travel choices reflect our own internal worlds? (the philosophers’ mail)

“Unfortunately, we generally don’t quite know where we need to go on our inner journey towards psychological evolution – and rush out to destinations that have been foisted on us by the travel industry or some accident of logistics. We say – somewhat casually – that we’d love to see a desert – but we’re often not clear why desert scenes ‘move’ us. Yet to be moved by an image of a destination is, in essence, to recognise a congruence between a place in the world and a destination on our inner map. There is something in the scene we see outside that our inner eye knows we need inside.

Getting ready for a journey should involve working out what the next stages on our inner journey should be – and then taking these rather unformed, destination-free needs to a travel agent in order to find places in the world that could support them. We might also sit with postcards of possible locations and ask ourselves, from a psychological point of view, the only question that matters: ‘What is there here that I might be craving inside?’”