A Suggestion

I am not a world traveler in the National Geographic sense of the word. I have been to several countries in Europe, but I have not been anywhere in Asia, Africa or South America. When my friends talk about their trips, I am always interested, but rarely envious. I have wondered throughout my life why this is. I certainly love to learn new things, and I have been told I am annoyingly curious. So you would think I would crave getting away and exploring new cultures and customs; in fact, when I have gone to new places, I have had wonderful experiences. It’s just that I don’t yearn to travel, to pack my bag and venture very far. 

When I was growing up in New York City many years ago, I often went to the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. I loved entering the dark domed room, pushing my seat back as far as it would go to look up at the projected night sky. The program was often about planets and I would go home and read about them in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I remember when I learned that the sun is a star — I could hardly believe it. To me, the sun was the main huge deal in the universe, so powerful that if you looked straight at it, you would go blind. How could the sun be the same thing as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star? It made no sense, but I believed it. I believed everything in the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

As I entered adolescence — or more accurately, as adolescence entered me — I began to think of my father as the sun in our family. He was the powerful star around which we all orbited. My mother rotated around him, getting her sense of gravity from her literary life. My sister and I had different relationships with him, but I would say we shared a moon or two. It was when I was about 15 that I realized my family was like the solar system. We were each living on separate planets. And they each had a name. My mother was on the I-Refuse-To-See-That-The-House-Is Burning planet. My sister lived on the Be-As-Unnoticeable-As-Possible planet. And I was living on the planet called I-Have-To-Get-Out-Of-Here. My years growing up were all about escaping the city, my family and the East Coast. I was born in the wrong place. I was not a New Yorker. I was not an urban dweller. I was geographically dysphoric; I was dying there, even as I was in the process of becoming my own person. I had to get out. 

At the age of 18, I accomplished my goal: I left Manhattan and went to Ohio for four years, then to Washington, D.C. for one year. I was on a roll: I moved to North Dakota and lived there for four years before finally settling in Minnesota at the age of 27. I no longer suffer from geographic dysphoria because I have, for all intents and purposes, become a Minnesotan; I have lived here for well over half my life. The planet I used to live on is far away — almost in another galaxy. I now live on a planet called Home and I revolve around a star I call The Point. 

I could have done well in a career working for the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, but instead I chose to be a psychotherapist. This is a field where life experiences — yes, even difficult ones — are on your side. They help you help others. I enlisted in getting my own therapy at an early age, much the way young men and women might join the military. My boot camp experience was a traditional Freudian psychoanalysis — complete with a couch — at the age of 16. I was hooked. Exploring what you know but don’t let yourself know is like traveling for me. It must be what going to a far-off, exotic land is like for my friends. Or perhaps it’s similar to spelunking. I once heard someone give a lecture on the Lascaux caves in France and I was riveted. All those amazing animal drawings hidden in underground, dark caverns. I learned that the reason these have survived for centuries is that inside caves there is neither human contact nor any variability of temperature and humidity. Everything has been stable and protected. These paintings were discovered by accident when the dog of a French teenager fell into a hole. Imagine the amazement of happening on those paintings! 

Well, that’s what therapy is like for me. It’s the way I travel. And if there were a frequent flier program associated with it, I would be at the Diamond Platinum Gold Medallion tier. I have traveled to far-off inner lands that no one would believe, and I hope I am helping others to do the same. It is such a privilege to do depth psychotherapy, to accompany people to their as-yet unexplored worlds, to help them know about the planets they have inhabited and the stars around which their lives have revolved. 

And here we are in the middle of a pandemic; no one can travel anywhere safely. There are rumors that some airlines may go out of business. Many people I know are deeply sad about trips that were planned, tickets bought, tours scheduled. All vanished into the cloud — I mean, the Cloud. Some friends were going to Paris, some to Africa and some to South America. Others were planning trips to Mexico for the end of winter. I have one friend who went to the Caribbean with his wife in January to celebrate retirement. They intended to stay three months, but they are now stranded there. The airport shut down and no one can enter or leave the island. They are stuck in paradise, and stuck is the operative word. No travel. 

Since we are all more or less grounded at home — or certainly we will be this winter — I merely want to suggest this other kind of travel adventure. It can be enjoyed without leaving the house — even while making and perfecting sourdough bread or doing 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles or making face masks. It is exploring the inner planet you are inhabiting — and using memories to visit all the past planets of your life. Delving into one’s inside life is not as exotic as going to Machu Picchu or seeing lions and giraffes in the wilds of Tanzania. And being curious about the unconscious or the purpose of one’s life sounds neither relaxing nor alluring. But just as going to far-off lands is life-changing, so is journeying deep within. In normal times, we get to do both, but as the scientists are warning, we may be in for a siege of sequestered days and months ahead. What if you found your inner life as interesting as the outer world? Just think: no need to wait for a vaccine to look at the universes within. Going there requires neither passport nor luggage, though you might possibly discover you have spent your life carrying around mountains of unneeded baggage that you can finally leave behind. 

It’s just a suggestion.