Beyond the Journey: Travel, Imagination, and an October Mystery

This October, I invite you to consider the many ways we can travel across the world, and also through language, film, imagination, and the stories passed from one generation to another.

People sometimes ask what advice I have for those who would love to travel around the world as I did but do not have the means to do so. I understand. I had wanted for a long time to visit the places I finally pushed myself out the door to see, but I did not seriously begin planning the journey until July 13 of last year. Still, I had already discovered ways to travel without boarding a plane.

For years, I have traveled from home by watching documentaries on television. I have studied Spanish on an app and watched telenovelas to better understand the language’s context, humor, and sarcasm. I have also tried to learn a few words and something about the cultures of employees from non-English-speaking countries who came to work in my lab. When I leave my comfort zone, I generally engage with people who may not look like me or think as I do. In these ways, I am always traveling, even when I do not fly abroad.

I also travel back in time—or to fantastical and futuristic places—when I take the time to watch movies. I particularly enjoy films and documentaries that test the imagination. One of my favorite lines comes from the movie “Next.” The film did not do well at the box office, but one line caught my attention: “Here’s the thing about the future. Every time you look at it, it changes—because you looked at it—and that changes everything else.” The line suggests that knowing or observing the future can change it.

Perhaps I like that idea because it seems to encompass science and magic at once: the imagined magic of changing an outcome simply by looking at it, and the scientific reality that the act of measurement can affect what is being measured in some experiments involving light and electrons.

That thought—how the act of seeing may change what happens next—brings me to a story suited to the October season. A resident of my village told it to me, and I share it here as I remember it.

One night, while the resident’s father was working as a pan boiler at the sugar estate in the next village, her mother fell asleep beside an open window. The house stood low to the ground, and her mother had rested her head on a pillow on the window ledge while waiting for a friend to pass by. The friend had said she was going to see someone and would stop to chat on her way home. Suddenly, the mother awoke when she heard someone ask, “Is it there you’re sleeping?”

She opened her eyes, and there, beneath the pale moonlight, stood a man whose face was as round as the moon above. His stomach bulged forward, protruding through the window. She did not know who he was, but she decided to show no fear. “Pull your stomach in,” she said. He obeyed, drawing it so unusually far inward that it seemed almost to reach his back. Without his moving away, she was able to close the window.

The experience frightened her, and she told her husband about it when he returned. His only response was, “You should not sleep there.” As for the friend, she had no real excuse for failing to stop. She said she had not wanted to bother her friend and had simply continued home. We can only imagine what the mother saw that night and why the man’s appearance—and his ability to draw in his stomach so dramatically—seemed so frightening. Whether encountered in life, in stories, or on the screen, unusual experiences can fire our imagination, unsettle us, and cause us to see the familiar in an entirely different way.

What places have you visited through books, films, languages, conversations, or stories? And has an unusual experience ever caused you to see something familiar in a different way?