But it’s not fundamentally about marijuana, you know. It’s about freedom. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone. It’s about accidentally realizing you learn more about who you are by leaving home and looking at your norm from a distance. It’s about a situation that roughs up your ethnocentricity. It humbles you. You thought you knew what music is, but you didn’t know what music is. You thought you knew what love is. You thought you knew what pain or joy was. And then you travel to the other side of the world, and you realize no, a billion people in India see it differently.
What other seeds were planted on this trip, that you’ve continued to harvest over the years?
I didn’t know what I was learning there, I was just soaking it up. I did realize that the most frightened people are those who have yet to travel. They haven’t had their hippie trail.
Why do we want to build walls in this country? When to me, obviously, if you want to be safe, you don’t build walls, because that’s not a prescription for safety but a way to withdraw from the world. If you’ve done a philosophical hippie trail, you’re more inclined to build bridges and less inclined to build walls.
People today say, Oh, man, I wish you could do the hippie trail today. I sure missed out. You were lucky to be there in 1978. No, you can do a hippie trail today. You can’t go from the exact same pudding shop in Istanbul to that chai spot in Kathmandu with a bunch of hippies on a bus like that, but you can have your hippie trail experience. The trick is getting away from home and reassessing a lot of truths that you were raised thinking are self evident and God-given, and then defining success for yourself when you get home.
In addition to bigger shifts in your worldview, I find that the most impactful moments from trips are often the least expected. Were there any seemingly tiny memories that have loomed large in the long run?
I met a professor in Afghanistan who joined me at lunch, and he said, I want you to know that a third of the people on the planet eat with a spoon and fork like you, a third eat with chopsticks, and a third eat with their fingers, like I do, and we’re all civilized just the same. At first I thought, Boy he’s got a chip on his shoulder. But he was right. I thought less of him because he ate with his fingers, and he knew that, and he was saddened by that, and he wanted me to know that we’re all civilized just the same. And then I realized there are different norms. Americans are expert at thinking we’re we’re the norm. Americans are expert at thinking the world’s a pyramid with us on top, and everybody else is trying to get there. Americans are expert at thinking we are exceptional. The only thing exceptional about us is that we could actually think that we are.
