Travel
verb
to make a journey, usually over a long distance
to move or go from one place to another
Trip
noun
a journey in which you go somewhere, usually for a short time, and come back again
when you knock and hit your foot on something and fall or lose your balance
an experience when someone sees or hears something that does not exist as a result of taking a drug
a person or experience that is strange or entertaining or exciting
a period of time when you experience a particular feeling strongly
Journey
noun
the act of travelling from one place to another.
verb
to travel somewhere
The Cambridge Dictionary 1017
(Journey) Literary
a process of changing or developing over a period of time
Macmillan Dictionary 2017
I think I’ve just returned from travelling…I woke up, wandered clumsily into the kitchen, one eye half closed, made a coffee and wandered back, slightly more alert on my return. Is this travel? Perhaps it was a trip.
Do we we make a journey and go on a trip? Let’s look at that. As I try to learn a new language I find myself falling back in love with the identities of our words. I’ve heard friends say learning other languages causes us to think in entirely new ways, almost encouraging new personas and personalities.
To go on a trip or to travel, I understand. But to ‘make’ a journey has a sense of craftsmanship about it, and a sense of work, and of external factors and creativity. I think about the world before cars and carts and when people would walk the length of countries for trade, or discovery. Perhaps they’d return with a romantic view of their unearthing, with stories of strange and foreign animals, or people, or landscapes.
You can journey on your travels and you travel on a journey and you travel on a trip and you journey on a trip and you might take trips on your travels thus a cause for further journey [breath].
I think the secret lies in the more poetic notions of journey (as many secrets do). I imagine all the movements of our ancestors, and how travel, journey, and trip are all recorded in cartography (the art and science of making maps, derived from the greek χάρτης khartēs, “papyrus, sheet of paper, map“; and γράφειν graphein, “write”). I think the point that map making is both an art and science is significant here, and Anaximander (thought to be the first cartographer) introduces the argument that perhaps ‘qualitative difference can result from quantitative change…’ (yeah!)
…And then I think about how all three are recorded in poetry, in music, dance, theatre, film, photography, prose and journalism and architecture. I think about my previous blog post, Go with the Flow: a tree that falls in the forest and the journey of music and how the term busker is derived from the Spanish ‘buscar’- to seek… and those of refugees, and all the journeys we’re making today, in love, in hate, and in learned compassion.
I’m sure there are many hardcore travelling veterans who would suggest their experiences with the world as representative of much more than ‘the activity of travelling.’ Perhaps because they have accomplished a sort of journey of the self, because observing and decluttering are essential parts of both. If I had closed my eyes on the train, rattling through the shanties of Sri Lanka toward Columbo, then yes with no doubt I had travelled. You could say I’d been on a trip. But with eyes open, and with faces pressed against the glass of the world, I think that we begin to journey.
But what about the wheelchair user, whose travels are typically between the same four walls, what about their sense of journey? Or the rehabilitated or the oppressed or the terminally ill, or the cancer survivor? This leads me to consider that journey is not reliant on physical movement, but movement of the mind.
Perhaps you’ve awoken from some dream that makes today seem clearer than yesterday’s events, or perhaps you listened to advice, or perhaps you read something that made you think a little further.
I think about the journeys cities make, building and rebuilding war after war, natural disaster after natural disaster and those of its citizens. I think about the journeys children make, bullied to bully, friend to foe, ignorant to aware and wonder if we ever really start one journey and begin another. I think about the journeys lovers make, certain to unworthy, uncertain to certain. I think about the journeys of academics and budding tradesmen and women and how different we say we were 1, 5, 10 years ago.
It’s one of those things that encapsulates every single person in this world, able or unable, static or inquisitive and with a philosophy intrinsically sensitive to the self, and to moving on in life. For some it’s synonymous with just ‘getting on with it.’
It’s a word indebted to the notion of movement but in actuality, we can journey without travelling at all.
Travel
An open road
is serpentine
overgrown
and being underground
and being really f*cking tired.
and we are quenching thirst like
addicts. .
Journey
Silence is the pity of buskers
hunkering
and wine is the sweat of lovers
bunking up
and breaking down
and we nearly all wear blue and white as though we are a reflection of the clouds. Eager to make way and find ourselves drenched and drifting.
and diplomatic.
Trip
I’ll be home for dinner.
Well As It Happens 