Read the full transcript of Don Lamp’s talk titled “How To Bring The Joy of Travel To Everyday Life” at TEDxTAMU 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Gift of a Lifetime
DON LAMP: Would you like to take a year off and travel the world?
I was on a 12-hour shift at the hospital, walking down the hall. The double doors opened and my cell phone rang. It was a detective.
“I’m calling about Joy Cunningham.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s my aunt.”
“I’m sorry to tell you, she’s passed. We found her in her bed. I understand you’re next of kin.”
“Yes.”
“Could you come out to Orlando and take care of things?”
Only 10 months earlier, I had gone out to Florida to help my Aunt Joy put her estate in order. She was in her mid-70s, but as spry and flirtatious as ever.
She was so grateful for my help. Since her husband and only son had died years earlier, she made me the executor and sole beneficiary of her estate. I was sure she would live well into her 90s, a classic beauty with a feisty independence. I was shocked she had died.
And here I was, 50 years old, having just received the gift of a lifetime. Weeks later, a spark of fantasy caused a flash of inspiration in my mind. I turned to my wife Mimi. “How about we take a year off and travel the world?”
My eyes were wide with the sudden possibility of it all. I could see the frugal wheels turning in her head. “If you don’t want to go, that’s fine, but I’m going.” As I spoke the words, I knew they were true.
After a long silence, Mimi’s eyes brightened with a little impish smile. She replied, “I’m certainly not going to sit here at home and read your postcards.”
The Grand Adventure
Six weeks later, we boarded the train in Palm Springs, California, and headed out over the wide open spaces of America: San Antonio, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; on east to Washington, D.C.; and down through the southern states to Miami, Florida.
Then we went international: the Caribbean, the Galapagos, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
From Argentina, we flew to South Africa. We traveled over land for 2,500 miles in the back of a truck from Cape Town to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I was fortunate to climb.
Leaving Tanzania, we flew over the Sahara to Morocco. We took the ferry across the Straits of Gibraltar, leaving Africa behind us as we disembarked into the dazzling European playground: London, Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Venice, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, and all the rest, and finally, Moscow.
We rode the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia and Mongolia down into the heart of Asia: Beijing and Hong Kong, Vietnam and Cambodia, and on into the exotic South to Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Next came Australia and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef, then over to New Zealand, Christmas in Tahiti, and with the start of the new year, Fiji, Samoa, and north to the Hawaiian Islands.
Landing in Seattle, we ferried up the Inside Passage to Skagway, Alaska, and finally, back on the train down the beautiful Oregon coast to California and home.
It was a year to beat all years. 50,000 photos, mind you. 365 days, 73 countries, two months in every continent, one grand circumnavigation of the earth.
I just knew when I got home, I would be a sensation. I would be welcomed with a ticker tape parade like an astronaut back from the moon. I was asked to give a slideshow at the Second Wednesday Women’s Guild at the local community church. And then, crickets.
I mistakenly believed that all my small-town friends and acquaintances were breathlessly following my world tour. Many of them really didn’t even know I’d been gone. When I’d tell them of our trip, they’d say, “Oh, I was wondering why I hadn’t seen you around lately.”
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to feel. The brilliant future I’d imagined over the past 12 months was diminishing and fast. It was a false future, propelled by the applause of an imaginary audience. But instead of enthusiastically continuing my daily blog, I shut it down.
Even though I had just completed the greatest thing I could have ever imagined doing, it was over. The fantasy vanished, and I grudgingly returned to my regular life, feeling somehow like a failure. I sat for hours, day after day, the weeks turning into months, head down, doodling with pen and ink on small squares of watercolor paper, swirling spirals of tangled symmetries, indecipherable, inconsolable, full of emptiness. All I wanted was to get back on the road.
I unfairly blamed Mimi for her lack of enthusiasm, for her unwillingness to admit that our lives had changed, that we didn’t have to go back to what we were before. We were globetrotters now. Deep inside, I knew she was right, that she was clear-eyed and grounded, but I didn’t want to accept it. She flew back to Florida to get our inherited houses ready for renting.
I rode my motorcycle across the country, trying to get my mojo back. In Florida, I was no help. I was a dark presence, an angry, pouting toddler. She suggested I go home.
So I saddled up for another 3,000 miles, road warrior, drifter, lost. I settled into a blank-faced resignation, my heart heavy like a funeral. Mimi returned home a few weeks later and strongly encouraged me to go back to work and go get that master’s degree. But even after I was working again and studying again, something had changed in my mind, like a boiled egg sent back to the carton.
I blended in just fine, but I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I knew something was different inside me. I couldn’t get back to that dream self I had created.
The Seventh Continent
I wanted to be that man I was when I was traveling. As it turned out, I was able to retire at 62 with my finances in order and my marriage going strong. But then, like some ancient virus reanimated from the bones of a dinosaur, my restlessness returned. I wanted my seventh continent.
So I found an expedition ship, booked a berth in a four-man room, packed my things, and arranged for spring break in Antarctica. I was going to finally get back on the road, but the teacher of lessons wasn’t through with me yet. The prize at my fingertips was snatched away. My big trip to Antarctica was canceled three years in a row.
So what happens when you can’t travel? During that time, whenever Mimi and I had itchy feet, we’d turn to each other conspiratorially and say, “Let’s put in our tourist eyes and go take a drive.” We would take the back roads and go exploring little towns close to home, and it really did feel like we were traveling again. Tourist eyes.
Tourist eyes. This simple idea proved to have the power to transport me back to where I had been on my best days of travel. A tourist is a person who travels and visits places for pleasure and interest. Business or pleasure, they always ask before stamping your passport at the border.
Tourists don’t have to travel. They want to. They travel because they’re curious, eager to uncover some hidden treasure. So on June 14, 2022, I decided to undergo a metaphorical organ transplant.
It was a DIY procedure. No waiting for an organ donor. No ophthalmologist required. Turns out tourist eyes are available for free for anyone.
The Four Themes of Tourist Eyes
So with my new tourist eyes firmly fixed in my sockets, I fired up a travel app, the one I had been going to use on my trip to Antarctica, and declared, “Let the traveling begin.” I took what I knew about travel and applied it to my everyday life, and here’s what I found. Four main themes emerged: discovering the potential, defining the purpose, deploying the power, and defending the program of tourist eyes.
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
The first theme: Discover the potential of tourist eyes by keeping them open and watching. I don’t have to keep doing this monotonous routine day after day. I will discover a better way.
This happened for me through a shift of focus caused by the delay of my Antarctica trip, allowing me to momentarily glimpse an alternate path. Instead of travel being the exception, I could make it the rule. Instead of dessert, the main course. For you, it may be the realization that you don’t have to keep waiting, that travel is not so much about sightseeing in famous faraway places as it is about seeing with new sight the wonder of the world and its citizens wherever you are on any day.
You could say that tourist eyes are wider definition sensors than regular eyes. With tourist eyes, you can see divergent paths in your peripheral vision almost as clearly as you can see the main road in your direct line of sight. In order to see this way, you need to relax your gaze and let the full view in. Football quarterbacks learn to enhance their peripheral vision and situational awareness.
Practice seeing alternate routes. Scan the field around you and quickly assess each one’s potential for making your day more pleasurable and interesting.
The second theme: Define the purpose of tourist eyes by leaping through the portal of your best vision of today. I will wake up each morning with expectancy, like I’m packing the car to go visit my best friend.
Listen, in order to follow a strong though vaguely understood desire to explore a novel point of view requires decisive action. It’s only by stepping through the just open door that we can get to the new space beyond its threshold. Once there, this untried domain can be seen more clearly, can be described and defined.
We’ve been taught, “Look before you leap.” In the case of tourist eyes, it’s look after you leap. The main thing is to leap through the open door before it closes. Safety yields no change.
It’s not a blind leap. It’s a leap of quick intuitive resolve.
The third theme: Deploy the power of tourist eyes by disciplining your gaze, remembering that what gets your attention gets you. I will take only a passing glance at the incoming feed on my phone and pay closer attention to the weather outside, the architecture, the food and the people, the way I do when I’m traveling.
But how do you maintain this atypical point of view? How can you stay in travel mode on your daily commute? Here’s how.
Take an alternate route through the wild countryside or through a residential area. Find a new drive-thru coffee or walk in and have a conversation. Activate your curiosity. Kids go crazy in the car and that’s why we have the game, “I spy with my little eye something blue.”
Suddenly the kids are in search mode, eyes out the windows, trying to be the first to find that elusive blue something. Tap into your dissatisfaction with the normal look of things and let your peripheral vision shine brighter.
The fourth theme: Defend the program of tourist eyes by unapologetically working your plan to promote serendipitous discoveries. I will start the journey of each day with a fresh map. Dismissing yesterday’s itineraries, ready to explore the ever-widening domain of today.
To be a daily traveler, you must commit to your vision. Embrace your title as a tourist.
A person just passing through, light as a temporary feather but rooted in the rich human soil of belonging everywhere. Exhibit the good in chosen way you’ve discovered. Resisting the urge to convince others to do the same or seeking their adoration or approval. People will say, “Why do you take a different route to work every day? What’s your rationale?” Learn to give simple answers. Show them what you’ve seen and what you’ve done. It will make more sense than any explanation could.
Let me reiterate: Discover the potential. Define the purpose. Deploy the power. Defend the program of your tourist eyes.
An Invitation
I have an invitation for you. Next time you walk in the door at the end of your day and someone says, “How was your day?” Expecting to hear, “Same old, same old,” surprise them with an in-real-life story about what actually did happen to you today or rather how you happened in your day.
I would like to leave you with this thought. It’s not where you go that makes you a tourist. It’s what you see. You don’t have to take a year off and go travel the world. Every day is a trip. Put in your tourist eyes.
