Direction: Aimlessness

Let freedom be your starting point, not your destination. (There is no way to freedom, freedom is the why.)

Depart with little, return with less. Leave yourself behind. (To travel is to release what must be released.)

Reclaim traveling from consumption, restoring it to the domain of production. (Travel has nothing to do with acquisition, not even the acquisition of experiences; to embark on a journey is to make something out of the body in motion, to fashion a dynamic composition out of the journey’s shifting encounters. Far from being a spectacle of consumption, the journey aspires to music, resonant invention.)

Eschew security, relinquish comfort. (When did traveling devolve from hazardous labor to innocuous leisure?)

Empty the traveler. (Traveling is not a lazy vacation but a diligent emptying.)

 Abandon your preferences, displace your predilections. (When the traveler devotes himself to seeking the beautiful, the pleasing, the orderly, he contracts the world to the narrow dimensions of the mind; the ecstasy of travel, however, dissolves the limits of the mind by replacing it in the immensity of the world.)

Suspend belief, inhibit habit. (New ways of feeling and thinking do not arise from new places but from displacements of the body-mind’s habitations, from crossings (questing transgressions) of the imaginary boundaries drawn by belief.)

Don’t project the mind onto the world. (Without expectation, departure is impossible. Encumbered by expectation, it is impossible to traverse the groundlessness of becoming (in other words, to travel to the other, to become-other). The traveler’s impossible journey: to depart from the security of expectation in order to arrive at perilous expectationlessness.)

Depart from certainty. (The knowing traveler travels away from knowing.)

Surrender to adventure. (Adventures come to the traveler, gifts of coincidence. When the traveler seeks adventure, all he manages to drum up is excitement, a mere simulacrum of the event.)

If you want to travel well, learn how to stay still. (The traveler arrives at the present moment by distilling the stillness in the midst of motion.)

Travel toward silence. (Burdened by possession, the traveler seeks to dispossess himself, but he cannot escape the habits of owning and I-ing, eyeing and owing that structure the circuit of desire and language, desire-in-language always returning the traveler to the self he is trying to shake off. How does the traveler arrive at signlessness, that nameless destination where he aims to lose himself? Nobody knows.)

How

to

depart

hopeful

return

emptyhanded

emptyheaded

emptyhearted?