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| Travel with Bates |
| The Las Vegas Sentinel-Voice, January 1996 |
| By Sandra Bate The truest kind of travel is always inward. What we seek when we journey is a break not so much from our homes as from our habits. A day off from work can seem as liberating a trip as one to Colorado. A sudden meeting of eyes can be as transporting as a cruise around St. Lucia. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes. Many of us are overwhelmed with life and agitation. Even with diversion, use our holidays not to get more color, movement and amusement, but to get away from them. Travel for us is a sedative as much as a stimulant. A day doing nothing can be the most satisfying adventure of all. If the ideal journey is one that carries us toward ideals, it can be found as easily as the room next door. Two days in absolute quiet can feel like two years. Two days in absolute quiet can feel like two years. Two nights walking underneath the stars can take us so far away from our routine that we return to the world reborn. There are many things one could say about a place that shakes us up and offers a change of time as much as space. The primary objective is to teach freedom and luxury of a higher kind. Days without a plan seem to last forever. Rooms without clutter make space expand. Removed from the telephone, we are reminded of who we are supposed to be. Release from the television, we are reminded of what we are supposed to care about. Every holiday takes us out of ourselves. However, this one can take us all the way back to a higher, purer self that we have forgotten. The need for stillness and for slowness becomes ever more pressing as the world grows ever more intrusive. Now that the information superhighway reaches right into our living rooms, all of us are, in a sense, roadside causalities. What all of this suggests is what we most need is a holiday from our everyday assumptions. The virtue of any trip is it enables us to see the things we thought we knew in a radically different light. For me, one of the most exciting trips in the world will find me in my motor home traveling up the coast of California to an area perched high above the sea. The luxuries this place offers are silence and space. The amenities include an absence of telephones, television and news. Far from anything I know, surrounded by nothing save stillness, rabbits and blue sky. I am taken out of my work day self and into a self as wide as space. I can climb, dive, surrender to the moment. I can draw, think or walk with the knowledge that nothing will disturb me. Travel itself is a kind of monastic exercise. We live more simply on the read with relatively few possessions and with our resumes left at home. We are at the mercy of kind strangers. We spend long hours alone and have the time to think, read and look at our lives from a distance. Retreat Communities cater to the traveler whose journey is inward, into the self. Mostly, what is offered here is freedom from concern. In silence and in emptiness, you can enjoy a holiday from all the things that holidays entail – from frantic guides and tour buses to airports and inflation. We find ourselves sitting still with eyes closed; we visualize the things that matter and move toward the things that move us. All of us, I suspect, have such retreats in our lives, whether they be just quiet places in the garden or friends who bring us calm. They may take the form of aerobics classes or yoga or cooking lessons. All of us try to find ways to stop, to take stock of our priorities. The danger in most lives, after all, is not so much that we are doing the wrong thing as that we are moving so fast, along a darkened road, that we cannot see whether what we are doing is wrong or not. |
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