We left Canada on December 24th and arrived in London on Christmas day. From there, we flew to Mumbai, where we boarded a plane to Goa, and arrived on the 26th thanks to the magic of the international dateline. After that long trip, and the wild cab ride from the airport, I was definitely glad to wind down and gently acclimatize to my new surroundings.
One of the main bio-cultural shifts I experienced was related to food and diet. Back home, I usually ate Indian food about once every six months. The spices were simply too exotic and hot for my western-programmed palate. Now, here I was in India, where spices were consumed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
In the morning, I couldn’t bring myself to have a typical Indian breakfast, so I availed myself of plain old sausages, bacon, eggs, toast, and watermelon juice. My stomach was thankful, particularly for the watermelon juice, but my sense of adventure was left unsatisfied and shaking its head in shame.
Chemical gustatory heat, thermal variations throughout our bodies, mechanical breeze vibrations, and the subjective sense of self relate to a group of sensory modalities that together make up the somatosensory system. Where the mechanisms of sight, sound, smell, and taste are generally focused on a specific organ, the machinery of somatosensation is spread throughout the body. In the ancient past this mechanism was mainly a tool of survival, but now we are free to use it for less pressing matters.
Traveling for pleasure allows us to widen the scope and range of modalities associated with somatic experiences. I often joke that vacationing is just a legal way to get high. Leisure travel on a mass scale was not possible until the industrial revolution when time and resources greatly expanded our ability to pull ourselves away from the yoke of the farm and head out into that adventure in the great outdoors. Developments in transportation, including the proverbial trains, planes, and automobiles, gave us greater autonomy and navigational control over planetary mobility. I can only imagine what the computer revolution will bring in the years ahead.
Resort grounds
In the afternoon, we went to the beach to bathe in the lukewarm waters and bask in the solar radiation. The sun was flexing its muscles above us, so we set up our ultralight Eddie Bauer landing pad under the shadow of the swaying palm fronds.
While Bianca frolicked in the waves, I geeked out with my new Lamy Safari fountain pen and notebook, jotting down the events of the past few days and marveling at the aquamarine ink on the page. As I lay there, journaling in deep concentration, a bemused Indian family marveled at my industrious lizard stillness. They said hi, took a picture with their phone, and left.
Bianca came back.
“How’s the water?” I asked her.
“Wonderful!” she said.
“Warm?”
“Oh yeah!”
“Warmer than the Pacific?” I said incredulously.
She chuckled.
That’s the magic of aviation, I thought as I wrote in my journal. It will take you from one ocean to the next in a heartbeat, and you don’t even have to be a mad explorer or a king, though you sure feel like one when you arrive. Suspended from the bonds and responsibilities of survival, tuned to somatic intelligence, transceiving the light fantastic, the mind expands cheerfully and with confidence across that great unknown country.
It must've been a wild Christmas party
Dive into another day:
Images by @litguru