Nothing Left Over

Once we are born, only two things are certain. One is that we will die and the other that we will experience change. In The Mahabharata, Prince Arjuna is asked, “What is the greatest wonder in the world?” and his response is, “Each day death strikes, and yet we live as if we were immortal.” Nothing in the universe stands still, so why is it that we are so often surprised by change and shocked by death? The whole of this book is about ways in which we can live more freely in the universe, without most of the stuff we generally carry around. This is, in some measure, a preparation for our final journey. But this particular chapter is about preparing for all the other journeys we take in this life.

Many of the changes in our lives appear to be thrust upon us, but there are also those times when we deliberately seek out change. The most obvious occasion is when we travel. Nowadays many of us find ourselves on the road or in the air at frequent intervals. Travel has become a “fixture” in our lives, and we do not always acknowledge its implications.

Whether we are going away on business, for pleasure, out of obligation, or as recreation, leaving the comfort of our own home causes an upheaval, even if it offers some measure of respite. For a time you are separated and released from customary chores and routines, but being in an unfamiliar environment entails other forms of stress.

The way I deal with this is to create a small comfort cocoon, in much the same way that astronauts do as they rove the skies. If you take a survival kit along with you, it provides an insurance you can always fall back on. The makeup of this kit will differ from person to person, from one location to another, and also according to the season. In the 1960s many girls would not leave home without their eyelash curlers. The main thing is to take with you whatever will enable you to settle into and enjoy your new surroundings without fretting over something you feel is indispensable but lacking. I once lived with a man unencumbered enough to carry whatever he needed in a waist pack, but most of us are under the impression that we cannot manage with just a comb, a toothbrush, and our ID.

If we are traveling because of our work or in response to a family crisis, we are relatively clear as to the purpose of our trip, but this isn’t always the case when we are “just getting away from it all.”

What are we looking for when we go on vacation? Isn’t it a break from our life in general? We want a change of scene, different circumstances, another view of the world, perhaps a new passion of some kind.

I find it interesting that Americans go on vacation while the British go on holiday. The original meaning of each of these words is quite different. Vacation comes from the Latin and has to do with emptiness and freedom, while the Old English holiday is a day or time dedicated to the sacred, wholeness, and health. Maybe the reason I prefer to go on holiday rather than on vacation is that I am English, but I suspect it is because the promise of what I might receive on holiday is far greater than what I might get on vacation.

It is important to be clear about the aim of your journey. Some people like to go back to the same place every year. I assume what they are looking for is comforting and familiar surroundings where they can relax and regroup. Others, like me, have something very different in mind. We want to stretch all our muscles—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. This often means that the beds and the food are not as wonderful as we would like, but it offers so many other possibilities that it is always worth the trade-off, and sometimes the accommodations do turn out to be good. Many people dream of going to a particular place, but they don’t think it through any further than that. This is rather like planning your wedding but not having any idea of what marriage itself is. It makes sense, therefore, to prepare for the trip, however long it may be, so that you can take full advantage of your time away once you are there.

I am drawn to places where I think I will be nourished on every level. I don’t go to great lengths to seek out these places. I use the same method as I do as an editor. With books, I keep an open and welcoming mind, and they arrive out of the blue. My vacation decisions come about in much the same way. Two weeks ago I opened a magazine and saw an advertisement for a trip to Turkey “On the Path of Rumi” and knew immediately that I would go on it. For many years I had wanted to go to Turkey, but it had somehow never worked out. When opportunities like this present themselves, don’t hesitate.

Over the years I have visited the Golden Ring churches and monasteries in the countryside around Moscow, spent the turn of the millennium at St. Peter’s in Rome with the pope (and ten thousand other pilgrims), explored arts and crafts on the enchanted island of Bali, traced the River Ganges to its source in the Himalayas, traveled with a group of Buddhists to practice centers in the southwestern United States, gone on a nine-day silent retreat in California, and made a short trip to a small town in Germany to be in the presence of Mother Meera, a young Indian woman considered by many to be an incarnation of the Divine Mother. In each case I was seeking to reconnect my spirit with the ground of my being, so that I could return home refreshed and invigorated, and in some measure this always happened.

When we are in new surroundings it is easier for us to see and hear more clearly. We don’t labor under the impression that we have “seen it all before.” When I got to Bali, I wished I had not boned up ahead of time by reading the Insight Guide. The full-color photos in the guide were so good that when I saw the actual places, I was rather disappointed because I felt I already knew what they looked like. It is always a toss-up about how much to read before you go. On my recent trip to China, I was so overwhelmed at the size of the country and the fact that I had no knowledge of the language and very little of its history that I threw up my hands and did nothing. I landed in Beijing in a state of tabula rasa, and everything I drank in was wondrously new. Generally, I riffle through a guidebook and read one or two other books to give me some background before I set off. This provides a context for whatever happens once I arrive.

I always hope for the kind of experience that happened to me in an industrial town called Ningbo on the eastern coast of China. An old Chinese friend in Connecticut had asked me to see if I could buy him a Chinese edition of the classic Zen collection of koans, The Blue Cliff Record. I marched into a three-story bookstore near my hotel and tried to find someone who spoke English. People looked at me in complete incomprehension but kept pointing upward (where it turned out the foreign-language books were) so I moved from escalator to escalator, always hoping that there would be someone with whom I could communicate. After fifteen minutes of nonsuccess, I came across two girls about age fourteen, one of whom said, “I speak English,” and they tried to help me. As I discovered much later, the name of the book in Chinese is nothing like The Blue Cliff Record, and so no one recognized the ideographs written on my little piece of paper. But just before I left the store, one of the girls asked me, “What are you doing here? Why are you here?” I was rather taken aback and didn’t know how to answer. She was asking what I was doing in Ningbo of all places, but her question aroused a deeper question within me: What was I doing here (or anywhere, for that matter) and why? I find that being away from home often puts me in wake-up situations like this, and I am grateful.

Whether I am going away for twenty-four hours, a weekend, or much longer, once I have left home, I am on my way. This may sound obvious, but what I mean is that once I have locked the door to my apartment, everything that has gone before is in the past. I don’t carry my ordinary life with me in my head. I do indeed vacate (in some respects I have become an American). I can travel an hour’s distance to stay with a friend and not think twice all the time I am away of the things that normally occupy me, so that sometimes twenty-four hours is all the break I need. When I go to a foreign country, it is sometimes hard for me to remember my job and my family back home. People will ask what books I am working on, and I cannot dredge up a single title.

I always carry with me a mini-notebook that fits into the palm of my hand, and when I am on vacation I make brief notes as I travel. I have bad camera karma, and so I have not bothered with photos for many years. My father once lent me his Nikon and I dutifully took thirty-six shots of Norway, only to find when I had them developed that the roller had stuck on the first frame. I felt as though I had missed Norway while looking through the lens, and I determined that I would never waste my holiday in this way again.

So nowadays I just scribble down a phrase here and there to remind me of a scene or something fascinating that I hear. This kind of shorthand enables me to write up a twenty-page journal of the trip on my return. Nowadays I have a small army of people who travel with me vicariously. They say that they are glad that I am making these trips and not them. They can enjoy traveling without leaving their armchairs. My Chinese professor friend and his wife have even put in a request for me to go to the Galapagos Islands because they feel that they are now too old to journey there themselves but they would still like to go (I declined. That part of the world doesn’t speak to me—yet).

I have tried to keep this book free of instructions on how to do this or that on the physical level, because there are already many books available that provide that kind of advice. However, friends and traveling companions always marvel at how lightly I travel. So, by popular demand, I am including my checklist of travel essentials that I keep handy for those stressful days just before you set off on a journey. If you have a list like this, you don’t have to wonder what you might be forgetting. Of course, your list will look slightly different from mine (particularly if you are a man), so just use this one as a model and make up a list of your own.

As you will see, I plan for every eventuality. You never know these days how unpredictable the weather will be or what pickle you will find yourself in, such as an extra eight hours on the runway, so it is best to be prepared.

Don’t travel with more than you can lift (or trundle). There might not be anyone to help you at the other end. Also, it is far safer to take the suitcase into the plane with you than entrust it to airline personnel. Airlines lose track of your luggage at the most inconvenient times. Well, I suppose that there really are no convenient times for losing luggage.

Some years ago I flew to India on Gulf Air, and we changed planes in Bahrain. It had been an interminable journey, and we arrived in Delhi at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning only to discover that all our luggage (there were twenty-five in the group) had remained in Bahrain and wouldn’t arrive for another forty-eight hours. One official with a blunt pencil was detailed to fill in the forms describing each piece of luggage. This took two hours. While we were awaiting our turn, the tour guide brought us cups of hot chai (the aromatic Indian tea) in thick, chipped cups. I had been warned never to drink anything out of a cup that was not my own unless I was in a hotel or restaurant, because there was no way to tell whether the cup had been washed properly. My own metal cup was, of course, in Bahrain. For about half an hour I hesitated, but when I saw all my fellow travelers drinking and realized that it would be two days before I would meet up with my cup again, I nervously accepted the hot tea. By the time we arrived at the hotel, I had begun to feel very ill. I spent the next two days lying on my bed, shaking from head to foot. I couldn’t eat anything and sipped just a little water provided by the hotel when it was absolutely necessary. I hadn’t caught any dire disease. It was simply fear. But it prevented me from running around town like the others who were enjoying themselves hugely, buying clothes and other things that they needed to tide them over. The moral of this story is that you should not lose sight of your own luggage. This means packing very economically.

Always keep your toilet bag in a state of readiness, so that you don’t have to check it out and make last-minute purchases for necessities you thought you already had. The time to check everything is before you put the bag away at the end of your vacation. Make certain that each little bottle or tube is full enough to last two weeks or however long you usually go away for.

Leave in your suitcase the things that you use only when you travel so that you don’t have to collect them from wherever each time. For instance: shoe bags, extra hangers, tea bags, airplane socks, and toilet bag.

And, lastly, leave room in your suitcase to bring back goodies from your trip. If you have to sit on the suitcase to get it closed before you depart, you are going to be in trouble when you find something irresistible in a market somewhere.

Here is my list:

TRAVELING ESSENTIALS

(This includes what you are wearing)

Permanent resident card (I’ve never become an American), passport, money, and ticket (including copies of the card and passport to be kept in a separate place. If your passport is lost or stolen, the agony will be less if you at least have all the details with you)

Map + list of addresses and telephone numbers of people to visit in duplicate (keep each list in a different place so that when you mislay one, you can still find the other)

Food for the journey (Why would you want to wait until the airline decides to serve its unnourishing meals?)

Ziploc bags (including one for taking small bottles and tubes of paint through security)

Dried fruit and nuts (in case the hotel food leaves something to be desired or an excursion lasts four hours longer than anticipated)

Tea bags (English breakfast)

Ground coffee and gold filter (it’s unlikely that the coffee will be as good as your own)

Hard candy (for when there’s no water)

Strap in case suitcase breaks (mine never has, but it just might)

Toiletries (including tissues. Take half a roll of toilet paper in a plastic bag and keep it in your purse or pocket. You don’t want to be without in an emergency)

Small and large shoulder bags + money belt (keep your passport and extra cash in your money belt. It’s worth the trouble, and you will no longer feel the belt around your waist after a few hours)

Swimsuit(s) (you never know which hotels will have good pools or when you might come across a mountain spring)

Umbrella and raincoat

Laundry bag

3 hangers

2 books

Notebook plus extra pen and pencil

Painting equipment

Sunglasses and reading glasses

Sun hat

Binoculars and camera

Alarm clock (check the batteries before you leave)

Flashlight small enough to carry in your purse (ditto)

Washcloth (these are unknown in many foreign climes)

Pull-on slippers for the plane

Warm jacket or coat, gloves, and Polartec headband (in winter)

2 pairs of shoes

2 pairs of socks

Nightgown

Pashmina (no nice Jewish Buddhist would travel without her pashmina shawl)

Jewelry

4 sets of separates that can be mixed and matched (don’t include anything that needs ironing)

1 outfit for out-of-season weather (the world climate has already gone berserk, so be prepared)

5 pairs of underpants

When you pack, you will find you can get more in if you fold things as little as possible. Align both legs of your pants and fold them over just once. Fold sweaters and blouses horizontally, and then fold the sleeves on top. This small step can make a huge difference, not only in the amount of space you save but also in the number of wrinkles the clothes don’t have.

The first time I met my editor, he was very intrigued to see that I was going off to stay with a friend with nothing but a large shoulder bag. He wanted to know how that was possible and asked exactly what was in my purse. This is what I told him:

If I am going for just one night (as I was on that occasion), I figure I can wear the same thing the day I arrive as the day I leave, although normally I wouldn’t do this. So all I need are clean underclothes and tights or socks, plus a sweater or shawl of some kind because it is usually ten degrees colder in the country than in New York City. My cosmetic case always contains a traveling toothbrush, a tiny tube of toothpaste, lipstick, rouge, face cream, mirror, comb, safety pins, toothpick, aspirin, fold-up scissors, cough lozenges, Band-Aids, a few sheets of toilet paper (and the cosmetic case is small, believe me), so I don’t need anything more for one night. I like to sleep in my nothings, so no nightgown is necessary (unless I am staying in a hotel and think I might need to flee from a fire in the night). What else? One book. A pad and paper to write on. An umbrella: I often carry a fold-up umbrella, so that wouldn’t really be extra for the weekend, and I also carry a Japanese fan for unair-conditioned subway cars, plus a small flashlight for descending emergency staircases in tall buildings in the dark (I had to do this from the twenty-second floor at my office once and don’t want to be caught that way again). I make sure to wear shoes that will work for almost every occasion and are good for walking or loafing in. Oh, and a small gift for my host.

That’s it. I don’t know why people make such a fuss about packing. I don’t like to haul a great deal around with me, and I rarely miss all the things that others seem to bring along, particularly since I have noticed that most people do not actually use much of what they take away with them.