Travel today isn’t what it used to be. People are tired of shuffling through the Louvre with the crowds or sitting around for hours at airports on their way to a Caribbean beach holiday that becomes a bore after two days of sunbathing. More and more people are choosing travel that widens their personal horizons and gives them experiential adventures. One of the best options for turning this into a reality is to become an empathist and journey into the lives of strangers.
What is the secret of this avant-garde form of travel? How do you do it? You can take a lead from the English writer George Orwell, who turned empathising into an extreme sport. In the late 1920s, after five years as a colonial police officer in Burma, Orwell decided to live as a tramp on the streets of East London, a period of his life described in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. He regularly donned shabby clothes and shoes, and set out virtually penniless to stay in homeless hostels and doss houses, wandering the streets with beggars and vagabonds for weeks at a time. One year he tried to get arrested so he could spend Christmas in gaol, but he resolutely failed to do anything bad enough for the police to take notice. It’s not always easy being an empathist.
What made him venture on these eccentric escapades? Partly he felt guilty for being an accomplice of the British imperialism he had grown to despise and wanted to understand the lives of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Just as important, though, was his desire to broaden his life experiences and become a writer: his travels would give him all the material he needed to pen bestsellers.
Don’t mistake Orwell’s approach for the current trend of ‘poverty tourism’, where you might tour Soweto or Rio looking briefly at the slums from inside an air-conditioned SUV before heading off for a good lunch. Orwell knew that the real way to change his life was to have authentic experiences etched on his skin, by being in rather than merely seeing the lives of others.
So if you want to master the art of living, take your inspiration from Orwell and cultivate yourself as an empathetic adventurer. Look in the mirror and ask: whose shoes have I always dreamed of slipping into? Maybe a week picking grapes in the vineyard of your favourite wine. Or perhaps helping your postwoman do her deliveries one morning. So pack your bags and prepare for a different style of travel. It is time to escape into empathy.
Roman Krznaric is on the teaching faculty of The School of Life. You can find his new blog, Outrospection, at http://outrospection.org/
You might also be interested in Roman’s one-minute definition of the word ‘empathy’, made for the Wordia online dictionary project, filmed on location at The School of Life. Click here to watch.
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