Travel Priority

Zion National Park is De Ja Vu. It is a mirror of a life once my own. It is past, present, and future when I stand on the cliffs of Angel’s Landing and peer 5,790 feet downward. My feet hug the edge and the wind catches my breath as it rushes upward through my hair. I am hanging in the balance and I’ve never felt so alive.

Zion National Park is inexpressibly beautiful. It is force of nature, earth, wind, water. It is millions of years surrounding. It is majesty and it is memory. I am only a small element, a momentary flicker, in the lengthy span this canyon has enveloped. That is comforting as I stand atop it’s peaks and gaze down at the earth so far below. I’ve been here before, and that person and time seems like a dream. 

Time is the currency of life and I’ve spent it combing through every accessible – and sometimes inaccessible – reach of this vast canyon. I’ve sat alone in the darkness staring upward at the cliffs, curled my knees to my chest between two walls of solid rock reaching deep into the earth and felt the weight of separation that place provides, felt the vibrations of history radiating from the stone, climbed the atmosphere. 

Zion National Park is a religion, my sanctuary, the place to which I will forever return.

Zion National Park is De Ja Vu because it offers a sense of restlessness, the kind I felt when I first climbed to the top of Angel’s Landing and put my toes as close to the edge of the cliff as possible so I could feel the wind stirring from the bottom of the canyon. I wrapped my arms around myself and felt restless for this moment in a life that was not yet mine. Somehow I knew it would happen: there would be years in which I would be anywhere but here, when I’d sit behind a desk, when I’d struggle with depression and anxiety, when my heart would break, when I’d lose faith and trust. The first time I met Zion, I was only 18 years old and, though I didn’t know all the things I didn’t know, something in me said to hold on to Angel’s Landing forever. To tuck each detail into the cabinets of my mind for a later date when I’d need it more than anything.

When I return in 2019, Zion National Park is De Ja Vu, yet this time I am not restless for the future but rather restless for life in general. Day-to-day life. I’ve been so many places, I’ve worked jobs that drained the life from me, I struggled, I’ve been wounded, my heart broke in half, people I trusted hurt me. And in those moments, I remembered Angel’s Landing and something about the hope for another moment on that cliff’s edge carried me forward day after day. I’d made it back again in 2019 and apologized to the stone for not coming sooner.

I am now content to be restless – restless for this moment a million times over in a million different places.

Oxytocin

My spouse visited Zion when when he was a child and always said it was one of his favorite places. He also loves the ocean, green and blue like his eyes, and the warmth of sunshine, golden like his hair. I’ve loved Adam before I even knew what love meant, before the time had created the building blocks for the true nature of love which is commitment. I've loved him like the cliffs of Zion, Key Largo tide pools, and the ice of Glacier National Park. It’s funny: I discover my mind constantly associating those individuals whom I love most with places I love most. And Adam? He is Zion National Park. Steady, timeless, an old soul.

Yet, I tell him I do not love him.

Rather, I say that I oxytocin him and he laughs.

Oxytocin: a nine-amino peptide involved in social recognition, sexual arousal, orgasm, trust, anxiety, and bonding. It is the “love” hormone, or the “cuddle” hormone, as I’ve heard it called. Oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus and secreted by the pituitary gland. Like any hormone, it is produced on a feedback loop which triggers its production based on stimuli which could be anything from heroin shot straight into ones veins to a lover’s kiss.

When I look at him, I oxytocin him physiologically. When I oxytocin him, my brain interprets the feeling as “I love you.”

Love is oxytocin and that is tangible and explainable and quantifiable. I like those things very much, and I should because I am a student of neuroscience. Brain physiology as it pertains to behavior encompasses my world – especially when that behavior is abnormal. When oxytocin does not come easily, when serotonin levels drop, when neuropathic facial pain is the cause of this.

I am studying for my second career as a neuropsychologist who specializes in the behavioral implications of chronic pain disorders, and it is a future which the 18 year old standing on the peak of Angel’s Landing never could have foreseen. Much has happened since that day that I never could have imagined occurring in my life.

There are three things I want, and it took me a long time to figure them out.

1. I want to love Adam as much as I can for as long as I can.
2. I want to be the best clinician possible for patients in both emotional and physical pain.
3. I want to travel as far as I can as often as I can and experience as much as I can.

If I die having done these three things in some capacity daily to the fullest capacity which I was able to over a lifetime, then I will die happy and face whatever comes after. I can identify the reasoning for my resolution for these three goals.

First, I know I want to love Adam because I chose him as my partner following a series of events that I may or may not share. Not all personal stories must be shared, even in this age of information where personal mystery is often lost.

Second, I know I want to be a neuropsychologist because I’ve seen extensive amounts of pain in this world and feel dutiful to ease it in the capacity my aptitudes best allow.

The third goal, however? Travel? It’s a bit more of a puzzle that I have considered from the scientific angle with which I approach the rest of the world. After all, what really forms interests? What creates that unique desire to do one thing? What makes me “oxytocin” travel to the point that I am willing to spend large amounts of money and time and even sometimes risk my safety to go new places and try new things?

The beauty of existence is that we are each specific in our interest and personality makeup influenced by both innate tendencies and environmental impact – the classic debate of whether nature or nurture is more impactful upon human nature.

Nature Vs. Nurture

Suppose a subject comes from a childhood home in which they embarked on adventurous and frequent trips, a home where travel was incorporated into daily life. Should that individual grow up to become an independently avid traveler as an adult, are we surprised? After all, the person grew up in the environment – impacted by the NURTURE of those adults around them who influenced their interests. It is an easy attribution.

However, suppose the same individual came from a home in which they did not travel frequently as a child besides a week-long vacation once a year to some static location such as Florida year after year. The influence of travel is not part of their lives besides this routine adventure, and their family is otherwise quite content to remain local. Yet, when the child grows to adulthood, they become the avid traveler we now consider. This is the NATURE of the person without correlation to the environment of their upbringing.

So, then, when I say not only is travel a major interest but there is admittedly an additional level of psychological dependency to it, am I coming from the viewpoint of nature or nurture or perhaps a bit of both considering I am the product of a family who traveled quite frequently my entire life including full-time for four years.

How do we become who we are? PhDs are earned on the subject and behavioral psychology has only touched the surface of the human identity and all its innateness and influence.

Travel Identity

And then there is us.

The travelers. The individuals who consistently hold space for travel – making it a priority integral to our every-day lives. Those who have travel entwined in their very DNA, in the synaptic firings of their neurology, in their hormonal tides – the outdoors adventurers, weekend trippers, worldwide voyagers, life-long learners, conscientious thinkers, and experience seekers.

Us: Who understand life is too important to do anything other than live by the principal that we must experience each moment to the fullest.

In this mindset, travel becomes a priority as would eating a meal or being punctual for a job, maintaining grades, brushing teeth, or eating dinner. Travel is not a luxury, but a way of life. It is not selfish, it is not frivolous – don't let them tell you so.

Where travel is priority, excitement and adventure abounds in a life lived fully.