Watershed: Loving

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Editor’s note: Rick McKay, Joe Masonick, and Jack Karolewski, have been annual travel companions for more than 50 years to a variety of sites with many goals. This week’s adventure is the fifth in the series.

The previous part is at thevoice.us/love-of-adventure-binding-for-50-years-of-travel

By Rick McKay

In the coming years we took advantage of opportunities that would disappear shortly after we experienced them. Our 1977 journey from Istanbul, Turkey, to India would not have been possible less than two years later. By then, the Shah of Iran had been overthrown, the U.S. Embassy stormed, its personnel captured and held hostage for the next 444 days. That same year, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, effectively closing it to tourism.

We were ready to jump when watershed moments in history unfolded. In 1990 we traveled by car through Eastern Europe just months after communist regimes began to topple in the wake of the opening of the Berlin Wall in Fall 1989.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The adventure that would succeed our 1970 Alaska journey was of quite a different nature. It did not involve travel in the normal sense of the word. Rather, it was an exploration of inner space, a spiritual quest. But its role in bringing us closer together is no less important.

Watershed moments for the trio of travelers includes a discussion, early and often, of the classic book on love.

For most young people there comes a time when they begin to wonder about, and perhaps even challenge, everything they have previously thought to be true. It happened to me between freshman and sophomore years in college at Northern Illinois University. I was working at General Mills in West Chicago where I met a young man, a year or so older, who introduced several books to me, the most important of which was Eric Fromm’s classic work “The Art of Loving”. Fromm suggested that there are four kinds of love: Love of self; brotherly, or platonic love; erotic love; and love of God.

To that point I always thought that love was something one fell into, a profound feeling or emotional reaction to another person over which one had no control. Fromm suggested that even though feelings and emotions are part of love, true love is not a set of feelings, but a decision one makes toward the object of one’s love that involves commitment and action to bring about fruition. This concept was mind-blowing to my 19-year-old understanding of the subject.

But what is most applicable to my friendship with Joe and Jack was Fromm’s discussion of the love of God. It was the first time I had heard of the notion that God is within every individual as opposed to some anthropomorphic being outside oneself, looking down upon humanity, guiding, judging, rewarding, punishing. Fromm discussed how mystics used meditation to make a loving connection with a power within, a power that transcended the self, that power being God.

During my sophomore year in college and from that point forward I entered upon a spiritual quest to learn more about the nature of God and how that might relate to my personal development as a human being. Coincidentally, this subject was of interest to Jack, and in time, to Joe, as well.

Between 1970 and 1975, we became involved in a period of meditative practice that, I can only say for myself, transformed me to my core. I look back on these years as some of the happiest of my life. They were very heady days, indeed! Sharing our experiences as we traveled this inner journey made the three of us closer still.

Initially, I thought this spiritual quest was sufficient, in and of itself, to raise my consciousness to an adequate level to understand and appreciate life fully. But as I was soon to discover, I was wrong. In Spring 1975, Jack convinced me to join him on an eight-week grand European tour. My eyes were opened to the importance of seeing the outer world, as well as well as the inner, in all its splendor and richness, as well as its poverty and squalor.

Visiting the great cultural centers of Europe, my breath was taken away. I stood in awe as the stunning art and architecture of the Western world unfolded before my eyes. Conversely, in subsequent travel, I would be shocked to my core by the deprivation that plagued so much of humankind, families living in unimaginable slums, young children in rags pursuing our train out of New Delhi pleading for a few coins, mothers with deformed babies begging on the streets of Istanbul. These experiences changed my consciousness in a profound way and shatter my former myopic world view. I am sure both Joe and Jack were affected in the same manner.

Travel was indeed a transformation for each of us, and the fact that we shared many of these trips together, broadened and deepened the wealth of our common experiences and strengthened our bonds as friends.

Continued at thevoice.us/travel-adventures-mountain-peaks-rafting-exciting-europe

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