Travel Isn't A Bug — It's Genetic

I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but at this point it’s impossible to deny any longer that I have an affliction. Looking back over my life 40 years or for two weeks the pattern is clear. I can’t sit still.

Seen from any possible point of objectivity, I seem to be locked into a pattern of incessant movement. At various points if I stop and take a reckoning of where I have been, I am struck by how much moving around there is all the time. It goes back to the beginning. I was always moving around and exploring whatever territory was open to me even when I was a kid stuck in Topeka.

It’s clear looking back that the movement is erratic. It has no ultimate destination. It is movement for the sake of movement. It is the state of rest for a body in motion. Someone once called it “going nowhere fast.”

There is something about the open road that calls to me, that moves the seas within me. A great sense of peace settles over me when I head out on another journey. Somehow, ironically, I seem to feel most at home when I am in motion.

I suspect that most people who read this website know what I am talking about and many share this affliction. As an American I am in good company. This young country was built by restless people, most of whom came from distant continents. The joys of the open road are a relentless theme in America’s literature and folklore, from Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad” to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” from Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory” to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Throughout American popular culture there are endless affirmations that prove that your wanderlust is part of the American character, and  more than that, part of human nature.

Looking beyond America, it’s clear that this roaming malady is something shared by a large portion of the human race.

We are a nomadic species. Before agriculture was invented about 12,000 years ago, the human species was comprised of hunter gatherers. There were no other lifestyle options. It may seem like a long time in our terms, but on the evolutionary timetable 12,000 years is a blink. Humans have existed in their present form for 130,000 years or so, and before that their pre-human ancestors were very similar to them going back to the vanishing point of evolutionary history, changing only gradually over millions of years.

In the lifetime of the species, agriculture and the settled lifestyle it made possible are still relatively recent innovations. Before that time, all humans were nomadic. Being settled was relative. It was only a question of how large was the territory in which you roamed.

In modern civilization, it often feels as though being settled in one place is the norm and travel is the exception. But certainly if you take all human history into consideration, it is being settled that is the aberration. Movement for humans, as for most animals, is as natural as breathing.

Through recent advances in archaeogenetics, we can learn a lot more about our nomadic history than we knew only decades ago. The human migratory patterns from the human origin point in Africa to everywhere else have been mapped extensively through tracking mitochondrial DNA. A map of primordial migrations shows the almost inconceivable extent of human wanderings. This incessant wandering has been going on a long time on a huge scale.  

Homo erectus is believed to have migrated out of Africa to Eurasia 1.8 million years ago. Homo heidelbergensis migrated from Africa to Europe about 600,000 years ago, and is believed to be the ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, both of which remain in the modern gene pool by the way. And from there it hasn’t stopped.

During all of recorded history, the incessant movement of mankind, the travel, exploration, colonization and forging of trade routes has only accelerated. Since the rise of international air travel during the last 50 years, more people are moving around more than ever before.

In America, the European colonization started a furious western migration across the continent that only ended when it reached the abrupt end of the land on the west coast. Some have said that the American psyche has never recovered from the trauma of reaching the end of the land in its western expansion. That could explain some of the behavior that has emerged from California (no offense to my California friends. I love it!).

So face it. Travel is in your blood. Worse, it is lodged in your DNA in every single body cell. So when you get those urges, don’t think it is some kind of aberration. Give in to it! Cultivate that instinct, don’t suppress it. You were born with legs, not roots. It is inherent in your nature to travel, to explore. It is your freedom calling to you.

Kierkegaard said that while life can only be understood backward it must be lived forward. So don’t try to understand. Just get moving.