Josh Barkan at the peak of Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, in Morocco

The writing life is one of paradox: We spend most of our time alone, but we need to connect with others to be able to write, to have a subject matter.

I travel, perhaps, because it gives me a way out of the paradox. Traveling lets me be a voyeur, it lets me keep the distance to observe, but it lets me connect with people, living in a more intense way than in daily life, like drinking some concentrated juice. It is connection and disconnection at the same time.

For me, traveling is like breathing: it is something I need, something without which I start to wither. This may sound spoiled, but I feel this way because my parents raised me with frequent years living abroad. As a kid, we lived a year and a half in Tanzania, a year in Paris, a year in India. And then on my own I spent a year living in Japan and three years living in Mexico. Along the way there have been numerous trips and summers to Jamaica, France, Spain, China, Morocco, Burma, etc. etc. My first wife was from Spain. The woman I am happily married to now is from Mexico.

I travel without meaning to be a nomad. I don’t travel like those who go on long backpacking trips. I prefer to live somewhere else than to quickly go from city to city, but I like to grab any short trip I can to somewhere else, too.

What I am looking for is novelty. Not exoticism, which to me is romanticizing a place or dressing it up in feathers or pretending that the ugly is not mixed in with the beautiful everywhere around the world. What I mean by novelty is the genuine sensation of seeing something for the first time—like in one of those pre-museums in the German Wunderkabinett. The Wunderkabinett was a room filled with small curiosities from around the world. They are objects of surprise.

I can find that surprise traveling domestically, and I am happy to do so. I can find it in the white cedar trees on the Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington, or in a rundown restaurant with a po’ boy sandwich in New Orleans, or in Bushwick in New York when I take a bus far too long when the subway breaks down, going to visit a friend who has just baked fresh bread in a building with bars on the front door to keep out the crime. I can find that novelty sitting outside, at night, in Madison Square Park letting the cold air of fall wrap around me as I look at metal sculptures, made to look like the bare branches of trees, as the lights of New York slowly turn on in the high buildings from the 1930s around me.

I can find it in the antique stores of Wichita, where I live. The destination doesn’t have to be far away. But what I am looking for are new rearrangements of colors and people and scenes, which I have never known. It is the same feeling and search for discovery that makes me want to read books, about worlds I have never been to, with characters I have never met, or that makes me want to meet a mathematician, when I know little about high level math, or that makes me want to watch the close up finger plucking of a bass player in the Blue Note jazz club, where I used to get free tickets with a friend who worked there. Discovery. Surprise. Freshness. What makes daily living all too fast is that the days slip by without novelty, with routine, with a sameness that blends one day into the next.

Think about how long ten days on a trip feels. Ten days. The same ten days that usually go by in an instant, when doing our normal work. But ten days while traveling is like an infinite lifetime because even the grass on the side of the road looks different, the pavement of the road, the light, the way the moisture lifts off the ground in the morning, the call of the morning sounds as people buy fresh bread or as the muezzin calls.

It is in the new that we connect, and finally begin to see the old when we are back home, understanding it more deeply for the first time. I return from each trip a bit tired, and waiting, hungry for the next embarkation.

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