Going on Erlaub (Staycation)

Staycations became trendy following the recession of 2008, but seem to be out of fashion these days. Here is an appeal to dust off the concept. If you like the place you live, earn an NGO salary, are an INTP or all of the above, a staycation might be for you.

Alain de Botton puts his finger on the key to a rewarding staycation in his book "The Art of Travel" (2002), explaining how to "apply a travelling mind-set" to a familiar place (p. 242). What we need, he says, is to be receptive and humble and to become "alive to the layers of history beneath the present". You'll know that you have succeeded if you "irritate locals" and "risk getting run over".

To translate staycation into German, I began to ponder the word Urlaub - vacation. I was delighted when my suspicion was confirmed that Urlaub actually derives from the verb erlauben - to allow. If we can just allow ourselves "new eyes", as Marcel Proust once said, we can embark on a "voyage of discovery" without seeking any new landscape.

In order to permit ourselves to rethink the ordinary, we also have to forbid ourselves a few things. First, we have to let go of the household projects, errands and unanswered e-mails that can make staycations become fake-cations. But we also have to leave behind a few cherished things – so that we better understand their value upon return.

To facilitate a re-framing of the familiar, I recently spent ten days looking after a friend's cat - and making use of her otherwise empty house. This well-known, but unusual space gave me permission to indulge in unscheduled time. During my staycation, I traded in my guitar for internet radio and a CSA subscription for a Vitamix. I don’t know how well I managed to tweak out “layers of history” during visits to an urban garden, a spa, and the public library, but my curiosity and heightened awareness did occasionally halt sidewalk traffic.

My travel companion, Minou. 

People assume because I live abroad that I am adventuresome. But I am really just a homebody who, through personal attachments and a love of speaking in tongues, ended up on a foreign continent. Already struggling with having two Heimats, I am afraid to travel anywhere I might find a third. Luckily, the place in which I live has a ready supply of reading nooks, green spaces, museums and other places where transformation is pre-programmed into the experience. 

Uvatiarru

Half of the world speaks one of only 20 languages as a native tongue. With the dominance of English in the digital realm, we're on track to even more language concentration.

I have always thought of language diversity as important for transmitting unique ways of viewing the world. For example, Canadian Inuit use the same word for "past" and "future": uvatiarru. This raises many interesting philosophical questions. (I learned that it the book New Slow City (2014) by William Powers.) But after reading the piece "A Loss for Words" by Judith Thurman in the March 30th issue of the New Yorker, I began to think of language diversity as a rights issue.

Thurman discusses forced assimilation of First Nation and native American school children - depriving them of the possibility to learn in their native languages - as a violation of rights. This was widespread practice in the U.S. and Canada, even after Mohawk Indians built Manhattan's skyscrapers, and the Navajo language - impossible for the Germans to decode - helped to decide the outcome of the Second World War.

There are 800 endangered languages in the world according to Thurman  - and NYC has a higher concentration of them than any other place in the world. What can we do to right past wrongs?

Thurman tells an inspiring story of Keyuk, a young man who taught himself Selk'nam, the language of his mother's ancestors, of which there were no know speakers. (He used recordings by anthropologist Anne Chapman from 40 years ago and written records - mainly translations of scripture - from missionaries.) Once he mastered the language, he found an elderly woman in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America who understood him and in fact did know Selk'nam, but had deactivated her knowledge of it. A few days after their encounter, she passed away, as if she had been waiting for that final, authentic connection to her past.

Uvatiarru. The past is the future.