In Motion: The Experience of Travel

Crowded airplanes and their lack of customer service, packed subway cars on a hot day, and daily commutes to and from work that take longer now on average than at any other time in history add up to much frustration with travel itself. Hiss (The Experience of Place) suggests, however, that all of us have an innate capacity to enter a different part of our minds during our travels and to begin to make use of an awareness that has its own range of interests, concerns, and methods. When the mind and not just the body is in motion, our experience of our ordinary world changes, and we can look with new eyes on the details of the world around us as we walk to the local coffee shop. Hiss urges us to embrace the innermost dimension of travel (its ability to lift the wings of the human spirit) as a way of transforming our time spent in motion. Hiss calls this ground-shifting waking consciousness "Deep Travel," that is, something that surprises us when we least expect it. For example, as biochemist Kary B. Mullis drove through redwood country north of San Francisco, his waking consciousness traveled along a wildly different path as he invented the technique that makes it possible to copy billions of pieces of DNA in a few hours and later brought him the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In the end, Hiss shares his own enlightening experiences of the mind in motion, acting as our Virgil of Deep Travel. (Oct.)