In his latest book, In Motion: The Experience of Travel, Tony Hiss poses a provocative challenge: Can we rethink the value we put on all the accumulated years of our lives we spend in transit, all the “wasted” time spent in-between the places we live and work and visit? As he did in his ground-breaking The Experience of Place, published two decades ago, Hiss weaves a strong web of personal narrative, literary reference and human-awareness research, all in the service of the modest goal of changing the world. To get us going, he wants us look afresh at the hours we spend in motion, whether on a daily car commute, transcontinental flight, or adrift, wet and supine, on the “lazy river” behind the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He posits that in these experiences there is, or could be, a special type of awareness — neither concentration nor daydreaming, fight nor flight — that is richly human, indeed at the core of our evolutionary identity as walking, watchful beings.

Hiss calls such experience “deep travel,” and he prods us to recollect memorable travel experiences — the kind of train rides, for instance, when to our surprise we find ourselves open to the wonder of the racing suburban landscape, a sensation especially intense during, say, the first 48 hours in a new country, when every sight and sound is distinct information, impressed onto a mind alert for risk and opportunity. It’s an evocative premise, hard to read without thinking, as with his earlier book: Of course, why hasn’t this been written about before? Hiss is a great synthesizer, and he’s not shy of poetry, whether quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, or describing his own deep travel as resembling “sunlight after rain — details stand out,” and moonlight, too, because it “changes your sense of what has become possible and of what might happen next.”

Not the usual starting point for transportation planners. In planning circles, some officials talk about more transit or smarter highways or bigger airports; everybody talks about shorter commutes. Yet wherever they fall on what we now call the “sustainability” continuum, most planners, as Hiss underscores, hold on to the highly instrumentalist, technocratic thinking that prioritizes the getting-from-here-to-there, with little regard for the experiencing-on-the-way. Car manufacturers, of course, want us to fetishize the vehicle, promoting fantasies of power, agility and status: With the right car or truck or car-truck combo, you won’t be a commuter — you’ll be a savvy, sexy thrill-seeker. Hiss is keenly aware that the fantasy rarely feels true; most of the time you really are just a commuter, and if you’re unlucky, you’ll be on a roadway both stressful and dull, where it’s the distractions, from relatively benign radio to dangerous texting, that make it bearable. This is, in Hiss’s description, “already-there travel,” an inconvenient intermission from “real” life. Travel that is unvalued; hence his exploration of how we might make this experience more.

Hiss works hard to tell us what this “more” might be. He wants us to reconnect to our “ability to wake up while we are already awake,” one of his key definitions of deep travel. As in The Experience of Place, he is fascinated with our still limited yet lately growing “awareness of awareness.” At times, in pursuit of heightened consciousness, he walk us up the self-help aisle; and clearly it can’t be helped because Hiss is catholic in his reading, ruminating and interviewing. In search of deep travel, he’ll trek from the English physicist Henri Bortoft, who points out that Galileo “separated the motion of a body from the essential nature of the body,” to Canadian radio producer Jeff Warren, whose The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, explores “the presentness of possibilities” that come with “alert mindfulness.” For Hiss, such meditations get us close to an understanding of deep travel, in which motion is wrapped up in our “personhood.” Thus In Motion incorporates strains of religion east and west, the self-actualization movement, and metaphysics too, even more when Hiss argues that “wonder” is the perhaps the greatest gift offered by this type of consciousness, no matter whether you are hiking the Grand Canyon or ambling along 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Hiss is trying to change the way we think, or more precisely, to reconnect us to a way of thinking that’s become elusive.

Hiss argues that this “ability to wake up while already awake” fits into not just a scheme of personal experience but also into a larger environmental perspective. Perhaps the most eloquent sections of the book explore what Hiss calls the “longer nows” that deep travel affords, which are not just about achieving a richer, more complex and open-minded life in the moment, but also about developing a profoundly intergenerational sense of time. He writes movingly about how he’s come to see himself as part of the 400 generations of humans to inhabit the Hudson River estuary in the millennia since the ice age, and about how he’s also experienced that connection to a longer now through both study and direct experience; wandering through New Jersey’s vast, quiet Dismal Swamp, for instance, Hiss feels an “overwhelming sense of still the same.” Hiss tempers this admission, acknowledging that of course, much else isn’t the same at all. Yet his point remains strong — that we need to use the tools we have, our different types of awareness, to grasp our place in a span of thousands if not millions of years.

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Continue reading Ray Gastil’s review of In Motion: The Experience of Travel  on Places [at] Design Observer

—– Ray Gastil is a city planner and urban designer whose work focuses on waterfronts, campuses, large-scale mixed-use projects, and public spaces.