Tourist Syndrome as a Feature, Not a Fault

"Learn to renounce your own will in many things, if you want to live in peace and harmony with others. It is no small matter to live in a monastery, or in a congregation, without expressing complaints, and to persevere faithfully until death. Blessed are they who have done this well and reached the end of their lives in happiness. If you want to comport yourself well and continually make progress, consider yourself an exile and a pilgrim upon earth."

Thomas à Kempis

I'm not sure there's a hard, fast definition of "Tourist Syndrome". I looked it up and found patchy references to such a thing. Google wants me to make it "Tourette syndrome"!

But one definition I found fit what I had in mind; it referred to "looseness of attachment". That about captures it. To me, tourist syndrome is that ability to find local habits and culture amusing, provided you're only staying for a little while. You can even live somewhere for a number of months and still hold onto this perspective.

But after a year, it just cannot hold. You start to get irritable and despise those "cute" things that are now driving you nuts.

And I think there's something to be gleaned, spiritually, from all of this. We can tolerate a day, a month, even half a year, perhaps, of weirdness: just so long as the rest of our life feels untroubled by what we are encountering. But as soon as the irritant starts feeling like part of the fabric of what we'll be experiencing indefinitely, well that's a problem.

But what we read in 2 Peter 2 ("I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires...") and what we read in the opening quote suggest that Tourist Syndrome, applied appropriately, is precisely what we need for this life. We need to remember that "it's just a short stay."

When we remember that our visit to this planet in these frail bodies is bounded by some pretty strict time constraints, and that eternity is, well, a bit longer than that, we can more easily be gracious with the locals. Endure more hardships with a cheery disposition. Avoid the sins that entrap us.

Now on the one hand, this observation is not new and described well enough elsewhere. I've not discovered new lands, here. On the other, I know for a fact that I'm nowhere near applying these truths to my life. I am acting, most of the time, like an entitled foreigner stuck here with some irritating locals. 

What's ironic about it all is that I'm part of the irritating landscape that others here have to deal with. Some of them consider me to be the problem. And they're not wrong.

So I wrote up this reflection as an admonition to myself. Try to be a more gracious tourist, Pilgrim. The trip will be more enjoyable if I do. For me. And for the other tourists.