Live your dreams

_{Terra nullius}

A Journal Entry

"We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home. "

-         ABORIGINAL PROVERB

There is a sort of chaotic melody being played out. Rushing and bustling, wheels of suitcases screech across me, tannoy announcements go unheard. And here I sit, in between one home and another; betwixt and between. In the midst of this paradoxically organised clutter, a family of five catch my eye. The son sits near a backpack the size of his little sister, and I can tell by his mother’s eyes that he will be gone for a long time. It reminds me of the way my dad looked at me the moment before I set off on my 1,700 mile journey across the Australian outback. But then some three girls sever my view of the family. They mask on smiles and take a thousand photos on their iphones, it bothers me how social media has destroyed the value of privacy. But I guess that was always so, like those news reporters and tourists who would harass me along my expedition, taking photos and stealing the authenticity and sanctity of my experience.

‘Flight number VL197 will be boarding in half an hour’.

  I need to get up off this metal chair and stretch my legs, since I'll be sitting down for another 13 hours.

In a weird way I like the stench of the airport, artificial air mixed with corporate coffee. The airport is like a labyrinth, a fluid and dynamic structure. I think about Marc Augé’s description of ‘non-places’, places of transience that are more like passageways than rooms. I think it connects quite soundly with the idea of liminality. That is, the process of being betwixt and between. Not yet a man, but not quite a child. Not here nor there. Sitting on the threshold. Living on the tracks.

Back to my metal chair. The family is still there. The youthful boy sits alongside his mother, potentially embarking on a voyage of liminality. Of anti-structure. Liminality speaks of disrupting the order; disconnecting with social structures, detaching from a preconceived identity and essentially a rebirth of the self. I think that travelling is not about finding yourself but about losing yourself. Tearing apart your idea of reality. Shaking up your norms and rediscovering another way of viewing life. There are moments when we feel deeply embedded in a tribe or connected to a land and then there are other times when we can feel completely lost and detached, almost child-like in trying to make sense of the world. It is the latter period that picks at my curiosity. Being vulnerable and uncomfortable, testing the boundaries, scrutinising what we so naively accept as ‘common sense’ and burning the expectations and assumptions. Turner’s impression of liminality only falls short on recognising variation and over-specificity. Maybe he was nostalgic of the Ndembu in Zambia when he suggested that only liminality can only occur in small-scale tribe societies? Or maybe he was just drunk? Of course liminality can pertain to all humanity, in a myriad of shapes and forms. Or at least I think so. This is where Augé’s description of non-places, or more so, his elaboration of Michel de Certeau’s theory, fills in the missing gaps. He describes non-places as a space of alleviating the self of prescribed identity, and instead the person is judged on the basis of what they do in the present moment. No assumptions or prejudices. The only thing that matters is now. Although this is encompassed in Turner’s description amongst the Ndembu, he solely ascribes these qualities to the group of initiated children (neophytes). But what about those who never quite fit a social structure? Who always seem to be the Other? Or the Matter out of Place? Like those who are bisexual, transgendered, of mixed ethnicities or religions, nomads, or those who just want to dance along the threshold? Turner denoted that liminality is always temporary yet, how would Turner ascribe the lives of refugees who never quite assimilate into their foreign country? Or what about those whose land has been stolen from them? How would he classify the Aboriginals? Or, what about my life now, between the Indian Himalayas and Australia; or the fact that I consider three countries my home? Where would I fit in his category?  

“Flight number VL197 is now boarding”

I think back to the early 90’s and how migrating with the nomads in North-East India made me realise that there are people who can be at home in empty spaces. Two years of non-places. Two years off the beaten tracks. In hindsight I realise that trekking with the Aboriginals in the Australian desert showed me how something strange can become familiar, and how the customary can become unusual. It is only a training of the eye, a training of the mind. Upon returning back home to Queensland I found it strange to wake up inside a home, rather than under the desert stars. Nomadic living takes the description of non-places and liminality and applies it to all corners of life. It emphasises the point that life is not hierarchical but seasonal. Unpredictable. Nomadic living teaches people to realise how easily we can adapt and move across the land. It teaches us how to see with a child’s eyes, it removes the ‘Other’ and emphasises that places are both empty and vacant at the same time. And only we try to classify them with dualistic terms. Nomads leave no trace, a space untouched. The collection of people who sit on this plane reminds me of how versatile the world is, and that in this plane, this ‘non-place’, we can come together to form a web of anti-structure. We belong nowhere and everywhere. Soaring through a passage in the air to reach a destination that doesn’t really matter. It is the process that counts.

I think it is important for domains such as psychology and anthropology to continue to move beyond their own confinements, to test their own theories with other cultures and to critique their own structure. To discover that there is no one way. I am not advocating destroying structure, I only encourage that people dance along a multitude of paths to find their own way. To realise that boundaries and structures are only made to be tested, broken and re-established. That is the only way we evolve.

“Real travel would be to see the world, for even an instant, with another’s eyes”.

 Robyn Davidson

This piece is heavily inspired by the novels ‘Desert Places’ and ‘Tracks’ from the adventurous Australian author who lives an inspirational life of a modern nomad, Robyn Davidson.

Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity http://asounder.org/resources/auge_nonplaces.pdf

Davidson, R. (1980). Tracks. Bloomsbury Publishing, Sydney. ISBN 9-781-4088-4714-5.

Davidson, R. (1996). Desert Places. Penguin Group. ISBN 0-670-84077-7.