We’re No Longer There We’re No Longer There
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The Blue Mosque, Istanbul. Photo by Dennis Jarvis/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Experiences

We’re No Longer There

Paulina Wilk
Reading
time 6 minutes

I drew my legs to my chest, chin resting on my knees, my back pressed to the cold stone wall. I wanted to melt into it, to disappear and be alone with the stone edifice, even if just for one short moment. To feel something, to be moved, to have this fleeting experience when an encounter with an emanation of beauty allows me to believe I am part of some greater good. And as a human, I am one of the creatures that can, sometimes, achieve magnificence.

But the Blue Mosque was filled with people. Curled by the cool wall, I stared up, as high as possible, at the ornamented ceiling. Anything to separate my gaze from the hundreds of other heads tilted upwards; anything to not see those outstretched hands with smartphones. I closed my eyes and tried not to hear the murmur of all those shallow, casual conversations covering the building, its history and all of us with the thick, sticky syrup of banality and tiresome repetition.

Before I even entered the Mosque, I waited for a good hour or so, queuing among groups of Chinese tourists, Indian families and European couples. I had spent that time staring at the scaffolding (the façade renovation is taking forever, and ticket prices somehow have not gone down, even though only half of

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The Art of Heedless Travel The Art of Heedless Travel
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Daniel Van Den Berg / Unsplash
Fiction

The Art of Heedless Travel

Self-Carelessness with Coachinger
Matthew Coachinger

Whenever the summer comes around, my students ask: How should we travel? How can we make sure that the holiday does not ruin the entire autumn, winter and spring already spent on the practice of Heedlessness? How can we guarantee that the time spent away does not take us back on the journey along the Path of Vagueness?

This is an important question, and every time I hear it, I am happy to answer it – approaching this matter without the help of one’s Master (that is, me) can have disastrous consequences. Novices who never ask me about this usually try to follow their still-too-strong intuition and decide on a holiday option that can be described, in short, as ‘catch a train’. At random, they choose the means of transportation and the direction of travel, then get off at a randomly chosen station or stop, walk straight ahead, turn right or left depending on the flip of a coin or the colour of a passing car. Finally, they enter a hotel or B&B that evokes neither positive nor negative feelings, pay for a room, lay down on the bed, turn on the TV, and begin to mindlessly flip through the channels. Then, they get up and start their evening by wandering through the streets of the randomly chosen city. They eat something not very good and go back to their room. Rinse and repeat for a fortnight or so.

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