Seneca, Moral Letters 28.2

What pleasure is there in seeing new lands? Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

 

Reflect that your present behavior is like that of the prophetess whom Vergil describes: she is excited and goaded into fury, and contains within herself much inspiration that is not her own: 

 

“The priestess raves, if haply she may shake

The great god from her heart.”

 

You wander hither and yon, to rid yourself of the burden that rests upon you, though it becomes more troublesome by reason of your very restlessness, just as in a ship the cargo when stationary makes no trouble, but when it shifts to this side or that, it causes the vessel to heel more quickly in the direction where it has settled. 

 

Anything you do tells against you, and you hurt yourself by your very unrest; for you are shaking up a sick man. 

—from Seneca, Moral Letters 28 

 

As stunning as a new location might be, it will have no meaningful impression on me if I have not first rightly disposed my own thoughts. A transition of place does not automatically result in a transition of mind. 

 

I never quite trusted those who insisted that New York, or Paris, or London would “change” me, since places never make anything of people, but rather it is people who make something of places. 

 

I learned how most of such talk was just a form of bragging, which suggested that all the travel hadn’t done that much to improve their characters. 

 

I remember how a group of us staying in Dublin seemed to spend more time lounging around at the McDonald’s on Grafton St. than at any of the local shops and pubs. How many who took a semester in Rome ended up drinking cheap wine in their rooms while millennia of history passed them by? Nothing will come of it without a conscious commitment. 

 

If I have already permitted myself to be swept away by confusion or anxiety, then traveling will not supply a remedy. I might as well lock myself in a room full of books and assume I will thereby become wise. 

 

Can travel help? It certainly can, yet it can just as easily harm, depending upon the quality of my judgments. Here is yet another aspect of the Stoic principle that circumstances are, in and of themselves, indifferent, and only receive value from how they are put to use. 

 

I suppose the simplest way to say it is that the opportunity of any new time or place is wasted on the thoughtless man. He can run away from home, but he can’t run away from himself. 

 

As I am on the inside, so I will react to the outside: that order of priority, between efficient and material causes, must remain clear. 

 

“But going on that trip to Las Vegas can’t really hurt, can it? It’s just a bit of harmless fun!”

 

Be careful—apply the rule. How healthy is my thinking right now? With a sound mind, a vacation can invigorate the soul, though with a twisted attitude, I am only going to make things far worse. The setting will merely magnify the temperament.

 

I have no experience in loading cargo on a ship, but I did once pack a moving van while I was in a bitter and careless mood, and the unfortunate results, discovered eight states later, will always be a life lesson. The way it goes in will determine how it comes out. 

—Reflection written in 11/2012