Noun, Verb, Kimchi: 11

Written by Clayton Foster

Remember The Game of Life? A strange little board game in which players push a plastic car around a pre-determined path representing the span of an adult life. It says something about the under-pinning philosophy of the game, created in the 1800s, that there are few deviations possible from the path, and that the player is forcibly hand-held through various unavoidable events: career-building, home-buying, spouse-catching, child-rearing, retirement. To win at The Game of Life, it comes down to how much money you’ve earned and how many clever investments you’ve made.

Can life really be boiled down to such identifiable, quantifiable, and dare I say, superficial values? It’s been on my mind lately, as I try to put into some kind of context the value of travelling, of which I’m on a temporary hiatus from, plunged back into the real world of working nine to five and not leaving a town every time boredom or impatience strikes.

To be fair, The Game of Life does offer an alternative method of success beyond earnings and assets... kind of. Throughout the game, lucky players will land on “life tiles”. Life tiles inform the player that they’ve done something deemed meaningful by the creators of the game: visited the Grand Canyon, say, or cured the common cold. Theoretically, the more “meaningful” events a player experiences in their life, the more they can offset the financial dominance of other players, and come to be the winner.

Ah, but how to attribute value to such events, achievements and activities in an understandable and consistent way? Here, the creators of the game run into trouble and take the easy way out: at the end of the game, players flip over their collected life tiles, and a financial value of each life tile is revealed and added onto the sum of the money already held.

So it happens that when confronted by the question of “how much is a meaningful event worth in a person’s life?” the creators of The Game of Life chickened out. For the rest of us, trying to figure out what everything means and whether it was all worth it... not so easy.

The terrible trouble with having a travel column is what to do once the travelling is over. I suppose I know the easy answer: stop writing. I admit, though, that I don’t want to stop. It’s the principle of it; just because you’re no longer being held hostage in a Bangkok massage parlour or sleeping outside the gates of a Vietnamese hostel, doesn’t mean that nothing meaningful or interesting  or fun happens to you.

Right?

The post travelling blues are common enough. Suddenly, you’re no longer promised new and weird experiences every time you step out the door. Interactions with locals don’t seem as charming or informative when said locals are talking in the accent you’ve heard all your life, and you’re suddenly less able to be thought of as unique or delightful as you were when explaining to bemused foreigners what “chur” means.

There’s something about travel that seems to accelerate things; you learn faster, you grow more, your relationships with people form more quickly and are more intense.

Then suddenly you’re back in your homeland.  Things seem slower, less eventful, less meaningful. Today seems a lot like yesterday, and you have a funny feeling that tomorrow is likely to follow suit.

So what’s the answer? Keep travelling? It might be fine for some, but I encountered too many ex hippies littering the path through South East Asia, teeth missing and arms scarred, men and women who had decided at some point in their twenties that they didn’t want to go home, that they thought staying on the backpacker path was not only sustainable, but superior.

What, then, are our other options? Return home, watch your tanline fade along with your friends’ interest in your stories, stick photos of yourself playing with monkeys in Malaysia on your office computer, act as if you were a camel, storing meaningful life experiences in your hump to get you through the drought of being back in the “real world”?

It’s at this point that I wish I had a life tile I could just flip over. Oh, I could say, living and travelling in Asia was worth $100,000. If nothing else, it would make me feel a bit better about my monthly payments to Mr. MasterCard. I could toot my little plastic horn and drive on down the path.

But as it stands, it seems that the challenge for anyone who’s returning from long-term travel is to be able to fit what they’ve seen, learned and done into the context of being back home, like old time explorers who returned to thrill folks in the mother country (even if our friends wish our stories were fewer and shorter). In other words, floating down the Mekong might seem meaningful when you’re there, but how much water does the experience carry once you’re back home sitting on the South Eastern every morning? Does an activity like venturing around a new culture have inherent value in itself, or is it like casino chips that are only worth something when they’re cashed in back at the bank?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know.

What I do suspect is that travel, like The Game of Life, derives its greatest meaning from the fact that it has to end. Then it’s up to you, when you’re back home, to try to find the same amount of meaning from a good cup of coffee at your favourite cafe with a good book as you did from bathing elephants in a Chiang Mai river or watching Cartoon Network with a monk in Cambodia.

Perhaps, then, all we’re left with is comfort in the differences between real life and The Game of Life. At least in the large-scale version we play every day, the value of experiences is attributed by the player, not a random card.