But travel isn’t a luxury waiting for ideal circumstances in our lives.  It is what we were made to do.  When we compare ourselves to our ancestors from a hundred-thousand years ago, we like to compare our physical selves.  But actually, it is the mental part of travel that most imitates our ancestral experience.  The human brain is something that evolved the way it did – enormous, complex, capable of imagination and unimaginable achievement – because our ancestors were on an evolutionary track toward generalization.  Meaning, rather than survival by specialization, which is the rule of speciation on Earth, humans survived by generalizing – learning to find nourishment and sustenance every possible way.

That required a big brain – and a brain that could categorize the plants, differentiate the tidal species, make decisions about weather, understand the seasons, make decisions on the fly. 

These are the traits of curiousity that made us.  And so, when we are walking among a reef of blooms, our own mind begins to wander into a primeval state of categorization, and we sweat from the sun and from our own exertion, this is an experience we evolved toward.  And to say that this act costs too much money, or is something we should wait for, is a really odd devil. 

It is a devil of our modern world, where so many voices are leading us astray from the very thing that nourishes us – getting out there and wandering in our land.  There are a lot of voices out there – commercial voices, cunning voices, plotting voices – that will benefit from changing our behavior.  By getting us to listen to them, instead of ourselves.

When it's nearly dark, I find my way back to the rental car.  Stars abound in the sky.

The next day, I need to head to Los Angeles to meet some business friends.  They are in the disabilities education market, and so, during the course of the weekend, I meet a variety of exceptional people, who, through accidents or illness, lost their sight, their legs, their arms. 

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