Travel allows us to live our dreams. To travel is to be a witness of our courage to make dreams come true, to do everything we want to do. Travel gives testimony of our willpower, of our determination of the limits of our spirit. Travel is the line of the life of our inner passion, of the life that exists within ourselves. Travel is the line of our energy’s life.

Steve Zikman en El encanto de viajar. Buenos Aires, Vergara, 1999.

Maybe you don’t know it, but there’s a line in the self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel as a form of overcoming everyday’s life limitations. Zikman’s book, cited above, belongs to this segment. The tactic: to describe the travel uniquely as a positive thing, and relating it to people’s desire to leave everyday’s life problems behind.

This blog has always been aware of not falling easily on purely positive representations of travel. To conceive it as something “intrinsically good” has many problems. First, it means assuming as true travelers’ stories, who as any other social agent, seek to present their own practices as something positive -something we all do everyday. Second, because it makes us lose sight of the domination relations that take place within the field and the negative consequences of travel and tourism -which exist, and are relevant and should be studied.

What doesn’t surprise us is that self help literature that appeals to the idea of travel resorts to and old common sense: one that opposes “everyday life” to travel -a recopilation about travel common senses can be found in a previous entry here. As I said before, there’s no such opposition. What does exists is a relation by which travel only acquires its sense because there’s something we call everyday life. If we were nomads, relations between everyday life and travel surely wouldn’t be the same.

Most likely, very little in self help literature is valuable or original. Most of these books try to give answers and start from an obvious assumption: that readers buy these books to find these answers. And if they’re unhappy with their everyday life, appealing to the travel as a “liberty space” is a good form to offer simple and plausible “answers”. We all know that when we travel we feel “more free”. Sure, because we’re not working

If you’re interested in digging deeper in the subject of the relations between travel and common sense, you can also check a previous entry called “Travel as space of freedom an other common senses” that I wrote a year ago in this same blog.