If we want encounters, sometimes we have to plan excursions, that is, initiate deliberate journeys to find others and othernesses to encounter.
I went on an excursion recently, a road trip to West Virginia where I saw beautiful places, did exciting things, and met interesting people. It was great fun, a bit daunting at the outset, a bit confusing in the middle, sometimes frustrating, somewhat tiring, but it expanded my horizons, inspired new interests, and challenged me to grow. I was glowing on my return, full of things to share, to think about, and new energy for both.
I posted about that excursion soon after I returned, but thinking through the topic of excursions generally has been complicated and taken much time, has been, in fact, an excursion of its own, which I’d like to share here.
I’m a retired man with enough time and resources to spend a week and a half on the road going from place to place far from home. I can have a road excursion but can all people do as I did? Are excursions of exploration just for privileged folk like me?
At home, do I provide myself a steady diet of local excursions? If not, am I meeting others and othernesses as I recommend through this blog? And if I’m not regularly having encounters, am I failing to live up to my creed which I call freshness-ism? And so, have I been talking through my hat this year?
Implicit in the term freshness-ism is the idea that freshness, transcendent freshness, actively invites me, wherever I am, to encounter others and othernesses in my vicinity. My part : to say ‘yes’ to invitations I receive, and to proactively plan fishing expeditions to places on the river where others and othernesses are active. Perhaps, I thought, I need to broaden my concept of excursion.
Elsewhere, I’ve classified the parameters of otherness, and of encounters, and presented types of others and othernesses. Why not types of excursions? This is the kind of problem I feel I can sink my teeth into, a thought project, which is itself a kind of other, thus making my engagement with it a kind of encounter. So I set out out to explore the territory of excursion classification as a kind of excursion itself, an deliberate detour from or displacement of my ordinary, comfortable, pro-forma routine.
As with all of my excursions nowadays, I filled sheet after sheet of notes and reflections (I write on copier paper with a fountain pen), usually starting each day’s thought with some small query which developed toward an answer that satisfied me (at least for the day) or was abandoned in favor of the development of another, more intriguing idea encountered along the way. Dated, numbered, stapled, each sheaf of such pages represents a jour-ney in the old sense, a day’s travel. I accumulated a stack of them on topic which I regularly reviewed to make sure I was still on track, and to encourage myself I was still making progress.
As with any journey, there were periods of fatigue and fear, of frustration and confusion: where am I and where am I going and what’s the point of this anyway, a sort of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ experience.
Walking helped me sort my thoughts. This or that perspective was jotted down in my pocket notebook as I stood in the middle of a forest path, then was transcribed into the day’s bundle of sheets lying loose at my workplace. I felt sometimes like an alpinist ratcheting his way day by day up a Meru mountain, overnighting in tents suspended from rock walls.
It’s a lonely process because talk about the project ahead of its consummation had a kind of frantic ‘almost, not yet, nearly there’ urgency, lots dramatic heat, little steady light. Now, from the summit, it can be told as a story.
So here’s what I’ve come up with. I want to stretch the tent wide enough to include more of the kinds of excursion any of us can feasibly hope to have in our days in our individual circumstances.
There are excursions of exploration, of course, but also excursions of hospitality, and excursions of friendship. [You’ll notice that these are three stances of solidarity.]
An excursion of exploration may be like my West Virginia road trip, a prospecting tour. An excursion of hospitality may be like offering a course on youtube to an audience whose preferences only become clear over time.
In an exploration excursion especially, the initial experience will be of general otherness or different-ness, and then particular others will become available to meet. In a hospitality excursion, the others may be identified as individual subscribers but what makes them distinct, their othernesses, emerging gradually.
Planning an exploration excursion, we consult our themata, our themes of personal and perennial fascination, to see if a candidate destination is likely to offer something relevant to our interests. What exactly that might be, or how, may be only hinted or guessed at in advance, but we’re willing to take the plunge after the ‘something there.’
Planning a hospitality excursion, we consult our worldview, our set of assumptions and presumptions about how the world is set up and works, to see if a candidate destination is apt to jostle our certainties, curious to see what new configurations they may take.
In both cases, we look for the potential for dramas of livingness to guide us in finding excursion destinations to follow.
A friendship excursion may be the process I’m going through with a biking buddy with regard to our adaptability to one another on our outings. I feel as if I’m consulting my basic motives as I think about where next to go in our relationship: survival (okay, not an issue here), comfort and dignity (dominance vis-a’-vis subordination.) The drama of livingness in this excursion is trust-how much, how far.
All of these self-consultations are at the same time consultations with transcendent freshness, who proposes what we might not normally entertain, and prompts us to agree to what we might not normally try. And then, when we go ahead, when we meet others and othernesses, gives us gifts of livingness to have and to share, so that we return from our outing changed or changing.
Thinking of excursions in this expanded way, I made a quick inventory of my life. Intellectual and geographical excursions of exploration: check. Political and horticultural excursions of hospitality: check. Relational excursions of friendship: yep, some of those too. Meaning that I am having regular intentional as well as accidental encounters (and my fears of fraudulency are refuted.) This assures me that excursions of different kinds are feasible for everyone.
I can, anyone can, with practice, become a more active and a more skilled encounterer, but I want to remember certain things:
Encounters, as such, are intrinsic, lasting and equivalent units of value in human existence, none more worthwhile than another, any more than people are.
Livingness is denominated in encounters, and livingness outlasts life.
Freshness is (participant) in all encounters, and our encounters are always (resident) in freshness. Or, more fully, transcendent freshness-spontaneous, un-calculating, ingenuous, untrammeled by the past-is in our lives whenever we encounter, and our encounters are ever alive in freshness, with fresh future forever.