Gone for a few weeks to China on a gig for EnRoute Magazine. Spotty to nonexistent internet while I’m gone.

Taking: 2 blank notebooks, 5 pens, a knapsack, and zero preparation.

Returning with: 2 full notebooks, a crucially necessary new attitude, and photos of elephants.

Enlightenment is an outside possibility.

We’ve been motoring seaward for about an hour when Roberto finally cuts the diesel. Brazil is a bare pencil line on the horizon, Monte Pascoal a tiny bump, as it must have been when Portuguese explorers first came across these cobalt blue waters 500 years ago, and I’m feeling more here than I have since arriving. Roberto yells at his mate, Uruca, to drop the anchor. Then we wait as the hook sets in the rock far below. With a flash of a smile, Roberto indicates that it’s time to fish.

We use strictly traditional techniques as those are the rules in this part of Bahia, even for visitors: thrown nets, single lines or spears with no scuba. We choose lines, and down they go: high-test fishing wire unwound off Styrofoam spools, hooks baited with bits of white fish that Uruca produces from a cooler. And up come, in what seems like mere seconds, the struggling ariocó, big red-flanked fish with yellow stripes. No Portuguese required for this moment; fishing is its own common language. “Olá! Look at this!” I shout. Roberto ribs Uruca, pointing at me, and says something like “He’s catching more than you! Maybe I’ll hire him!”

The idea isn’t so far-fetched: Trancoso is famous for swallowing foreigners alive. Since the local population – Pataxó aboriginals, Portuguese settlers and African slaves – first mingled in this seaside town in northeastern Brazil, a steady stream of outsiders like me have come to visit, and many never left, becoming immersed in the landscape almost instantly.

Back on land, Roberto and Uruca sell their catch on the beach in minutes. I bring mine to the Uxua Casa Hotel, where chef Bernardo shows me how to cook the fish in two classic Bahian styles: first steamed in banana leaves with olives and black rice, simple and clean flavours; then in a fabulous moqueca, which Bernardo insists I help him make. He guides me through the various steps, sautéing the onions and garlic and peppers, then bringing the fish to a boil in coconut milk in a clay pot, to be served bubbling at the table. Bahian perfection as the sound of a weekend-long soccer match drifts in and the pink-tinged clouds float seaward overhead.

On the grassy central Quadrado in front of Uxua, a cluster of old-timers sits with instruments in circled chairs under the shifting leaves of the amendoeira tree. Red and blue lights wink, and people clap and sing along while the stars swirl overhead. To hear samba in its birthplace is so perfect, I wonder briefly if the Uxua concierges, who seem to know everyone in the region as personal friends, arranged for it. (They didn’t.) The scene is just Trancoso doing what Trancoso does, in this case celebrating the life of a beloved local, a midwife they called Dona da Glória, who passed away a month before. And so we stand, swaying with the sweetly wistful music, sipping glasses of potent batida handed to us by a smiling woman in colourful beads and flowing skirt. And the distance between this moment and regular city life spools out into the night with song and drink and laughter.

The next morning, Romualdo, a baiano who runs canoe trips down the Rio Trancoso, shows us Bahia from the water. He drives us up craggy clay roads into the singing jungle so we can float downstream. It’s a voyage from the town’s private to its public face as we make our way past residences toward the beach. The dark green waters swirl under hanging vines; low-flying birds race overhead through clouds of mutuca mosquitos as big as your thumb. No dengue or yellow fever, Romualdo assures us. But the mutuca can bite through the hide of a donkey, so we slap on bug spray all the same.

Down the snaking, close passage of water, we glimpse into Trancoso’s backyard. Kids paddle in the elbows of the river next to leaning docks and brightly painted fishing boats. A man snorkels with a spear in search of the robalo fish among the mangrove roots. This is Bahian life in its natural rhythms. As we near the ocean, Romualdo describes how in decades past, it wasn’t unheard of for a lingering foreigner to receive land from locals through trade, although usually it was along the beach, which wasn’t as highly prized as land on the riverfront, with its access to fish and transportation. He says this as we glide past a magnificent gameleira tree, soaring to the forest canopy, braided around by seedling offspring that will eventually consume and replace the original trunk.

Then we’re out of the bush and into the final stretch of river before the beach, separated from the ocean by only a single orange sand dune. The river water is turquoise here, where the locals swim. Two boys do cartwheels across the grass, vaulting into the water in a tangle, a foaming eight-limbed river monster with two mouths laughing.

Someone across the Quadrado is holding a communal Saturday meal, and we’re invited. That’s how we learn about feijoada: a 24-hour stew of black beans, pork shin and salt beef, served over rice with farofa and couve and yet more batida to sip. We sit on the concrete floor of the casa festiva with families savouring a delicious moment. And when a pregnant dog wanders in and finds herself a half-finished plate on a low table and digs in, nobody looks twice. We were welcomed; so is she.

Chatting with locals comes naturally in Bahia, whether it be with men burning leaves in the square, a schoolteacher or an 86-year-old woman named Gida, who leans out her front window to offer us cajú fruit. We find shade at a café and sip foamy white cacao juice, watching a huddle of people drinking beer under a sign that reads “Ponto dos Mentirosos” (liars’ place). Gilberto Gil trickles from overhead speakers – his famous song “Toda Menina Baiana” about how all baiana girls have charm and spirit. There’s a certain way he sings, with a smile you can hear. Meanwhile, the men throw their nets in the river, and the wind applauds.

Samba closes our visit, as it surely should, this being its home. I’ll always remember the dark knot of people under the tree, the sway of bodies and the mingling of conversation and song. One song about taking the last train from São Paulo. And another where the haunting refrain is “Não Deixe O Samba Morrer.” Don’t let the samba die. The people were made of samba, the famous song says. Don’t let it die. And listening in the Trancoso Quadrado, that moon still very much on its rise, I’m embraced by the scents and rhythms of the essential Bahia, feeling glad to have been shown it so intimately, and quite confident that it will survive.

Holy stickers Batman. These things have hit Toronto, New York, Halifax… everywhere.

Now they’ve reportedly crossed the pond. They’re going up in the UK now.

Move over Banksy. Or whatever. I have no idea what this means.

In travel, while you don’t want to rush, moments of real speed can be exhilarating. I mean those times during a trip when you can feel the globe rotating under your feet, the landscape transforming before your eyes. Liftoff out of Vancouver, on a trans-Pacific flight, is particularly evocative of this sen­sation for me. The ground melts away behind, the scenery blurring and morphing. The sea opens up under the wheels, and there is a sudden sense of transference, of life moving from the known to the possible. And when the landing gear folds home, with that light but comforting thud, a point is sealed: We’re all in transit, in physical suspension, mid-teleportation. When the flight is over – I feel this every time, with a sudden and intense certainty – a new world of unpredictable possibilities will begin to make itself known.

In Tokyo for the past week, that peculiar sense of transference I associate with liftoff has seemed to follow me moment by moment through each day. I’ve been in the city without any agenda, living the moment, testing out an idea I’d had about “experientialist” travel. As a direct result, events and encounters have hit me with surprising energy. Each person I’ve met, each scene I’ve stumbled upon – by being unplanned, by seeming fated – has offered that glimpse of the possible. And so, Tokyo seems to have absorbed me into its rhythms more surely than would have been possible if I’d tried to impose any rhythm of my own.

I’m taking a fast train to Kamakura as I have this thought, enjoying that familiar liftoff feeling, the sense of what might be possible in this ancient town with its famous 11-metre, 120-tonne statue of Amida Buddha. The landscape is blurring, the globe seeming to spin under my seat. I’m on my way to meet a man named Lipton, who I met by accident a few days ago and who offered to show me around his seaside town, less than an hour outside Tokyo. Getting on board the train in Shinagawa, flowing with the vortex of bodies into the station, it occurred to me how Tokyo’s transit system itself contributes to the feeling of being absorbed into rhythms beyond your control. With its ongoing rush of millions of bodies, the trains here often feel less like a linear mechanical system and more like a quantum one, a series of black holes sucking people out of one reality and releasing them some distance away in the midst of another.

A word of caution, however. If you release yourself into this system, it can have unpredictable results.

Lipton is a Japanese studies professor, so I get some history as we cross the market streets and boulevards. Kamakura was the seat of Japanese government for almost 150 years, starting in the late 12th century. When rival warlords took fortress Kamakura in 1333, the ruling family committed suicide en masse, as did a large number of the residents.

But the Great Buddha at the Kotoku-in shrine remains, having survived the sack of Kamakura, having withstood the tsunami that swept away the shrine itself in the 15th century, having endured even being portrayed in the 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days as resident in Yokohama. The Buddha sits, resonating a sacred suspension of time. And people still gather in the hundreds in his mystical ambit, their hopes and cameras raised.

Still, Lipton does not want to linger here, clearly having some other site in mind to show me. So off we go again, up the Daibutsu Pass and into the hills this time, into a forest and along a trail that winds up the flanks of Genjiyama. Thirty minutes to the summit and over, as the town and the seaside sink and disappear behind us. Over the brow of the hill and down a steep roadway on the far side. I begin to assume that the trip is over, but halfway down, Lipton waves me to stop and indicates a doorway I would have missed entirely if I’d been on my own. A tunnel opening in the rock face, a long passageway greened over with moss and shining with the mountain’s interior waters.

It takes us into a hidden valley, open to the sky above but surrounded entirely by high cliffs topped with trees. Water spouts over ferns and roots and splashes into pools. There are various buildings here, long racks of prayers written on snips of paper and wooden paddles, hanging and spinning and wind-chiming in the low breeze. And off to one side, the Zeniarai Benten Shrine, which disappears into the cliff under a rock overhang.

I enter to the sound of water and low voices, ladles dipping and clinking. People gathered in groups, money shifting from hand to hand. Bills and coins. There is something sacred here too, suggested in the low light, the gestures and routines. But a sharp difference to the Great Buddha at Kotoku-in. No suspension of time here, but, instead, a pressing in. Currency giving emblem to an urgent present.

Then the nickel drops. Finally, I think I get it. Water and money. People come here to wash their money, to anoint it with sacred water. So that it will grow, and prosper, and multiply.

I head back into the city. I have dinner planned with a friend I met the other night in Meguro, watching the Chelsea-Arsenal FA cup tie in the wee hours at Seamus O’hara’s on Meguro-dori. I know, I know. But I wasn’t sleeping anyway. She lived in Okinawa when she was a girl. She was raised in Kyoto, now works in fashion in Tokyo and is a Chelsea supporter. Go figure. When Didier Drogba scored the winning goal, getting on toward 3 a.m. Tokyo time, we both stood and yelled and high-fived, and the crowd still gathered there at that hour: airline pilots, students, an Italian guy who’d just returned from circumnavigating the world in a 26-foot sailboat. They all looked at us like we were nuts. Then the signal flickered and the TV went out. And everybody who wasn’t watching the game yelled, “Godzilla! Godzilla!” until the television eventually came back on.

Mika was her name. She told me it meant beautiful grass.

We go for Okinawan food at an izakaya called Komahachi, in Meguro. Goya chample, a bitter vegetable served with egg and bacon. Umi budoh, strands of seaweed with tiny bulbs that pop in your mouth, a saline hint of the sea. Mimigar, chewy pig’s ears sliced thin and served with a sweet hot mustard. And cold sake from Kochi, overpoured into short glasses and allowed to spill into a small saucer. Mika, who’d long ago gone to school in my hometown of Vancouver and loved it there, talks about memories. “Life is busy,” she says. “Your memories of something that changed you get smaller and smaller as time passes. But then you meet someone and you’re transported back, and the memories become full again.”

She was right, I realized, even though I was only just then making my memories of Tokyo. But when I told her about my day in Kamakura, about the Great Buddha and the Zeniarai Benten Shrine where people wash their money, she laughed at my telling of it because I was missing a crucial detail. People wash their money, sure. They dry it and carry it away in their pockets. But if they want it to multiply, if they want it to come back to them and change their lives, they have to spend it. We took a moment to think about that together, sipping Kochi sake. You have to let the money go into the quantum machinery of fate and the economy, let it lift off into its own moment of transference, without plan or expectation.

I walk back to my hotel in the dark. Past the storefront of Dream Japan, whose business I’ve been unable to determine, not by asking at my hotel, not by asking Mika or anyone else. Not even by going inside and asking at the front desk. Dream Japan. What is Dream Japan? The whole time thinking the dream was a particular Japanese thing.

Now I’m standing outside the store on Meguro-dori. I’m reading the same name a different way, like an imperative statement: Dream Japan. And that leads me to consider a different but fast-approaching moment of transference. The sea giving way. The landscape blurring, the world seeming to roll under my seat. The landing gear unfolding with that comforting shudder. And then, an instant in which we go from flying to not flying. Contact. Touchdown.

Dream Japan. Well, exactly. When I get home, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.

It seemed like a good idea when I woke up: a day spent hunting the perfect Tokyo cherry blossoms. Here was the plan, drawn up in the first seconds after waking, still in my bed at the Claska Hotel: I’d walk the Meguro-gawa upstream to its source, following the many kilometres of cherry trees that line the banks of the old canal, which links the ocean to Shinagawa and Meguro and which only disappears underground – according to my Tokyo street atlas – north of the Ikejiri-Ohashi train station.

Of course, timing is critical with cherry blossoms. So while I set out feeling confident, I know immediately after turning up onto the pedestrian boulevard that flanks the deep concrete channel where the river flows that something isn’t right. Most of the pink petals are on the ground already. And while the flurries tossed up by the breeze are pretty, they’re also sad. As if the trees, past their manic flowering, were now losing a brief extroversion they’d enjoyed, sobering and darkening, returning to the sedate and orderly shade trees they’d be throughout the summer.

“Great idea to look,” an English speaker tells me when I stop to ask where the city’s peak blossoms might be. “Only sorry, but you’re a week late.”

I’m annoyed with myself. I should have known. I’m mid-way through my experiment with an ultrasimplified mode of travel: no guidebooks, none of my normally obsessive planning. Call it experientialism, what I’m trying. It shares with existentialism a suspicion that reason does not always lead to understanding. But rejecting the isolating bad mood of existentialism, this approach is about blowing life open to opportunities and connections. Believing that we can glimpse understanding in exactly those unplanned moments when we’re just letting life happen.

I’ll acknowledge that the trip has had its moments so far. I’ve been lost more than usual, but the experiences that have floated my way – finding a geocached archive of Tokyoite dreams at the top of a Midtown bank tower or a hidden classical music café in the middle of the Shibuya love hotel district – have carried with them the sense of fate. As if, for being unplanned by either me or by a sales strategy aimed at me, they were more authentically my own. Meant to happen; meant to happen to me.

Now I’m standing opposite the pristine white smokestack spire of the Meguro Incineration Plant and wondering. Clearly, only those who planned ahead this year got to see the damn blossoms.

I carry on toward the source. It’s only two kilometres before the blue line marking the river on my map goes capillary thin, then vanishes in Ikejiri. I cut up through Meguro, past the tennis courts and designer boutiques. Up through Nakameguru, past the modelling shoots, a woman holding blue Cellophane in front of her face as the flash strobes. Just before the booming overhead crossing at Ikejiri-Ohashi station, I pass graffiti that reads “King Wylo Was Here.” And I press on, certain the source is near. But when I reach the road, the river disappears under a tangle of construction equipment and scaffolding. On the far side, only an ornamental trickle remains, idling up between the Ikejiri condos for another few blocks before expiring with an apologetic rustle under a purple hedge.

Now here’s something wholly unplanned: I head back to the hotel. To the soothing vibe of the Claska lobby, where I sit and read a magazine for awhile. The DJ is spinning “Music for a Found Harmonium.”

I regroup. I phone a friend’s Tokyo cousin whose number I’ve been carrying around. He suggests I ride the Chuo Line. Simple as that. “From the centre out into the wilds,” he says.

Here’s all I learned from the web before leaving (not planning, just checking): The Chuo Line runs west from Shinjuku station, one of the oldest JR lines in the system, out through Nakano, Koenji, then on to Kichijoji, where Inokashira Park may be found, with its lake and paddleboats and its shrine to the bitch-goddess Benzaiten, who’s apparently so jealous, it’s bad luck to enter her shrine (and the park as a whole) with a new girlfriend.

So I bump and roll westward, leaving the Shinjuku neon behind. I notice the kids getting on between Nakano and Koenji. Plaid shirts and wallets on chains, a guy with dreadlocks tied up in a tam. All heading somewhere. So I pick one of them and follow – a new waver in Converse high-tops and white-framed sunglasses lugging a guitar and an amp. He disembarks with the crowd in Kichijoji, where I lose him in the station throng.

No matter. Once in Inokashira, down past the flea market stands and the fragrant smoke of outdoor grills ready for the lunch trade, it’s hard to miss what’s going on. Japan might be the refined minimalism of teak lobbies and clean lines, but on a hot Saturday in a Tokyo park, it’s like 1,000 inner performance artists have been born at once. And then, it’s maximalism all the way.

Here’s a dude doing clog dancing and another man dancing in a skeleton suit. Artists sell pastel scribbles and sculptures made of wire and beer bottles melted into vases. There are magicians and balloon tiers and a roster of amateur musicians who cycle in and out of the performance spaces in the dusty square, just north of the lake, as lovers ply the water and ignore Benzaiten. Two bands compete during the time I hang out. There’s the leathery old-timer called Broom Duster playing country on a National guitar. Blue jeans, no shirt, cowboy hat, a mini-amp hanging around his neck blasting out his rendition of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” while some monster yakuza tattoo billboard squats nearby with his five Irish terriers all barking at once.

Then there’s the scrub band of nice-looking kids in black shirts with white painter pants who, I swear, all work at Starbucks when they’re not here playing banjo, washboard, bucket bass and kazoo. Playing the most annoying version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” ever recorded, and, yes, they have a CD. Lots of made-up English filler words along the lines of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Papapaaaa-yah!” But then I have to say, coming in loud from over my shoulder in the process of mangling an Elvis tune into unrecognizability, I swear I hear Broom Duster growling the words “findin’ me a pizza.”

Huge applause, both ways. And lots of laughter. This is what I notice sitting on a crowded bench halfway between the two acts with my late-afternoon snack of pork skewers and grill-charred corn, the smoke of an ancient grill in a side street making me squint and smile. Lots of people enjoying themselves and laughing.

Which makes no sense to me, at first. The scrub band is terrible. Broom Duster minus the hat and shades is somebody’s grandfather, old enough to know better. But then, my new wave kid shows up again, accompanied by a grungy-looking friend. And I suddenly get it, precisely because they don’t do what I’m hoping they’ll do. They don’t pull out the guitars and start thrashing out Talking Heads or Pearl Jam, complete with made-up words. Instead, they sit quietly in front of the scrub band, two coolsters from Koenji, cracking their Asahi tall boys and sparking up their Winstons, bobbing away to the music like they were beats in the Village Vanguard in 1952.

They’re loving it. And there’s no irony in their applause and laughter when the last song is over. Because it isn’t about being cooler than anyone else. It’s about a shared moment of peak extroversion. A manic flowering, yes, indeed. Broom Duster and the scrub band, all the artists and dancers and all the people watching too. Everyone at peak season. And sure, it won’t last. Sure, it’s disappearing, even now as the picnickers pack up, as shadows stretch and the light subdues, everything and everybody heading down toward the sedate and orderly purple tones of evening. But it’s a cycle.

I might have missed that point, even if I had seen the cherry trees at their peak. But stumbling into Inokashira by accident, I see it. The blossoms come back.

I get home late. I’m not planning it. I’m not planning anything. I just ride the train to Meguro and climb down into the street. Head for the hotel. But half a block up Meguro-dori, I recognize something. I have to stop on the sidewalk to think through exactly what it is I’m recognizing. Then it comes back. In my sketchy preparations for this trip, I’d wandered the Meguro neighbourhood in Google Maps Street View, and so, I’d crossed this intersection before and noticed a narrow alley turning downhill here. With just the suggestion of a restaurant or a bar down there, tucked in under an anonymous residential tower.

I go down and find it: the Black Lion. A little sock of a pub with tables made out of barrels and movies on in the back room. And a rare thing in Tokyo: a pub that actually is a local too, drawing the residents, Japanese and expat alike. Do I feel strangely at home? I do, indeed. And I would have, even if the owner didn’t turn out to be from Deep Cove, B.C.

So I settle into the bar for a pint and get to talking. And when I tell people what I’m doing, everyone has a suggestion. Someone suggests Namja Town. Someone else suggests the Meiji Shrine. Then someone pipes up, “Have you been out to Kichijoji?” And everybody chimes in: “Oh, yeah. You gotta check out Kichijoji.”

I don’t even have a chance to say that I’ve been there already, that I saw Tokyo blooming at its weekly peak. Because just then, another local comes in and announces, “It’s a boy!” and everybody cheers and toasts a healthy mother and baby, calling out the newborn’s name: “Kyle Kane!” So recently flowered into this world himself, with so much ahead to see and nothing planned.

I walk back to the hotel as the newspaper guys are loading up their scooters, folded papers stacked high in their baskets. And around the corner from my hotel, not 100 metres from where I woke up with my idea that morning, a single cherry tree riots with blossoms in the blue morning chill, full and white, illuminated from the inside by a lamppost around which the tree has grown. An ethereal and promising glow.

Dream City

I’m having a strange moment here in Tokyo. It’s 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I’m doing calisthenics in the park with about 50 old ladies I’ve never met before. Bending, twisting, stretching. Following the cadences of a warbly 1920s piano tune that’s playing from a radio up front. I’m completely out of place. I’m completely lost, might as well face it. But while the old ladies hide their smiles and the sun eases up over the ginkgo trees, a cool wind riffles the leaves and I feel paradoxically at home.

Of course, this makes no sense. I only stumbled into this place because I couldn’t figure out how to get back to my hotel. Perhaps this sense I’m having, like I’ve dreamt the whole sequence, is the result of arriving in Tokyo having done no planning other than pre-wandering a neighbourhood of Meguro using Google Maps in satellite view. I even left a brand new GPS-enabled phone at home, opting instead to navigate Tokyo with a wrist-mounted compass bought at a dollar store.

Not my normal travel style, I assure you. I normally plan trips as if I were invading Normandy: guidebooks and memorized subway maps, extensive pre-flight restaurant analysis and time-zone charts left for my wife so she knows the optimum hours to call. But however fond I am of data complexity, I have to acknowledge that not having a clue where I am or what I’m doing is a highly simplified condition.

Simplicity. You’ve probably read about it recently. Blizzards of books and articles by people giving up shopping or winnowing their possessions down to 10. It’s not a new impulse. Simplicity has cycled in regularly over the decades. The Beats, grunge, Slow Food – all these were simplifying movements in reaction to cultural complications of the day. But in 2008, even I would have to admit we really out-complicated ourselves. What was that market crash if not a complexity avalanche: derivatives, Ponzi schemes, NINJA mortgages and credit default swaps? The new simplicity books may be “Thoreau’s Worst Nightmare,” as Mother Jones said, but the phenomenon is real. Consider the fact that Professor John Quelch of the Harvard Business School has already published “The Next Marketing Challenge: Selling to ‘Simplifiers.’”

But even after Professor Quelch has taught the entire world how to sell things to Simplifiers (which is when complexity will come back in style, mark my words), the fact will remain that the experiences we value most are those that marketers do not devise for us. The chance encounter. The serendipitous discovery. Inexplicable in terms of profit motive, these expe­riences come to us with a tinge of mystery, of destiny or fate. As a result, we connect to these experiences more personally, holding them to be more authentically our own than anything for which we merely kept the receipt. Pushing Quelch’s logic to its conclusion, it’s in that kind of experience that the most authentic simplicity is achieved – in experiences that arise in the moment, when we’re just letting life happen.

That reasoning is why I’m here, doing this crazy thing: Tokyo unplanned. I’m in Rinshinomori Park, as I’ll learn later. I’m participating in the 81-year-old morning ritual of radio taiso(radio calisthenics). But in the moment – as a crow’s shadow flickers over the square and a child’s voice sings out in the distance – I link to an experience of untrammelled simplicity, made possible only by my freedom from strategy or expectation.

Encountered as the product of a plan, the scene would be too easily explained. Encountered this way, it’s magical.

At least, that’s the theory. Turns out, Tokyo is simplicity-resistant, just like me. I make some ground rules for myself. I decide I can ask the advice of strangers. So I’ve been asking people: What’s the most beautiful spot in Tokyo? I get a few leads, but many responses are vague, as if Tokyo’s complexity overwhelmed specific memories. Someone tells me flatly, “Tokyo is the last place on earth you want to explore without a plan. You should prepare one.”

I can’t disagree. In my normal life, I’d have one. But here I’m holding out for experiences on that higher perch: my destined encounters and fated discoveries. So off I go with my non-plan. Snippets of recommendations, hazy pointers. Out through the market streets of Meguro, past the bakeries and coffee shops, the places selling underwear and flip-flops, udon and the ubiquitous curry lunch bowls. Community Muzak plays from speakers like the soundtrack from an old movie. Dozens of shops sell 1960s-era teak furniture, while women yell from under the awnings, hawking strawberries and durian. On the window of a hair salon across the way, a sign reads (in English), “A Million Happiness Is All Around You.” And I feel again the dreamy, familiar, foreshadowed connection as I walk down Meguro-dori – open to anything, in the moment – and pass a place called Dream Japan.

Dream Japan. Inside it looks like a trading floor. Guys on phones, poring over monitors. But nobody speaks enough English for me to make my question understood. What is this place? “Dream Japan,” I hear myself saying, uninflected, as if I were telling the receptionist the fact of the moment, her face a friendly blank. “Dream Japan.”

Down to the Meguro-gawa now, a narrow river in a deep concrete trough that cuts up between the trendy shopping streets west of Ebisu, passing under the black flanks of the Naka-meguro station, where the izakaya are teeming every night. “Find the source of the Meguro-gawa,” I write in my notebook as the traffic howls past. But not today. Today I am following something else, which leads me to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, up the slopes east of the river and into tony Ebisu Garden Palace. The Westin. Aston Martins. Joël Robuchon. Tokyo is full of beauty, but the most beautiful people of all are sipping cava and eating Caprese salad on the terraces of Ebisu Garden Palace.

The exhibit at the museum today, called My Grandmothers, is by Yanagi Miwa. Photographs of young women, dressed and made up to look as they imagine they will in 50 years. More dreams. Motorbiking across the Golden Gate Bridge with a young lover. Bowing the strings of a kokyu in a seedy bar. Running an amusement park, ministering to the needs of the dying or children or nature. Erika, grizzled with artificial age, stands in blue light on her own tomb slab, pre-chiselled with the words “Fashion makes the world go around. Glamour is yours for the taking. Beauty guarantees a most elegant immortality.” Erika is being ironic, I suspect. But I’ll think of her later, following the scent of dreams still farther and finding myself in the seventh-floor lobby of the Midtown Tower. “Is this the art gallery?” I ask the white-suited attendant, who stands in the middle of an immense and seemingly empty room. Teak accents. Views of the opaque shower curtain of Tokyo sky.

“No,” she says, smiling. “This is a bank.”

But she knows why I’m here, so she shows me the d-labo: a wall-size screen and a familiar view, Google Maps in satellite view over Tokyo. And so I find myself floating across it once again. Manipulating an onscreen cursor with a massive wooden mouse wheel that sits on a pedestal in the middle of the room, popping up geocached dreams that people have entered through the d-labo website.

She translates beside me: “I dream for children to smile all over the world.” My cursor is hovering over the Midtown Tower. Right where we’re standing. It might be her dream. It might be mine. But the experience is entirely ours. Simple.

Time to eat. I have an address for a noodle place up in Shibuya. The only problem is that the train station in Shibuya processes 2.5 million people a day. You can’t see the air in Shibuya. Just people’s backs and 16-storey television screens with ads like the one for New Balance: “Love, Hate. The New Balance.” I’ve had a time out near the Hachiko statue to read my new map book, so I know that 2-10-22 Dogenzaka, Shibuya-ku means the 22nd building in city block 10 of the second sub-area of the Dogenzaka neighbourhood of the Shibuya district. But my resolve is slipping, and I’m really wishing I’d brought that GPS phone. Bring on the complexity of real knowledge; I’m starving here.

And lost again too. Completely, utterly. Twisting and turning and pointlessly looking at my compass in a warren of streets west of the station devoted wholly to the love hotel industry. Streets that turn me around, make me dizzy, then spit me out into the commercial abuse of Bunkamura-dori. I ask a policeman, who turns my map upside down and sideways, then directs me to a building across the street where there are no noodles, but there is a love hotel. I look back. He waves and smiles.

Back up into those crazy streets. Past hunger. Past being lost. I’m now into some permanent change of mindset, like what lost would feel like if you’d never known where you were in your life previously. I’m in a quiet street now. No traffic, no breeze. The bedlam of Shibuya tamped down, distanced. I’m standing opposite a building, older than the others. Neither a noodle shop nor a love hotel. It has a lion on the sign under the Japanese letters. And while this doesn’t reveal much, it secures my sudden and entire attention: this blank faux Tudor with the lion signage and the heavy wooden door with the handle worn smooth from use.

I go inside to find a café of a most unusual design. A waiter comes over and seats me. Whispers only. “Sumimasen, cup of tea? Arigato.” Low tables, carved pillars of dark wood, grooved flooring, antique floor heaters set at various points between the chairs, which are draped in white cloth, all facing the same way, addressing the front of the room as pews to a nave. And from the front of the room, an immense and impossibly beautiful sound, flooding out of 10-foot wooden speakers connected to a turntable. A warm sound full of all the flecks and hisses and texture of vinyl. Music.

I sit back. I sip my tea. I listen to Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, the composer’s impressions of a New World he had encountered. I’m in my own new world, noodles long forgotten. Later I’ll get the facts straight about this place. It’s the Lion Classical Music Lounge. It’s 80 years old, founded in the 1920s, right around the time that the radio calisthenics show began. The address here is 2-19-13 Dogenzaka, and my noodle house was, all this time, just around the corner.

But for now, the moment is simple and perfect again, as if it were, in all its details, preordained. I’m still lost, yes. But here’s the thing. In the moment, I’m found.

Azul Viva Tapas Lounge is down in the French Concession on Donping Lu. And while I’ve only been in the city 24 groggy hours, Shanghai delivers a moment of insight here.

The mix of people contributes to the effect. Our host, Peruvian/Canadian Eduardo Vargas, has invited a dozen of us this evening to taste-test new Azul Viva dishes, and the Conde Naste Shanghai Restaurateur of Year in 2006 is quizzing us after each bite: frogs legs with chili mayo, thin sliced beef filet with horseradish and crisp onion, foccacio with dipping oils, another beef dish with chimichurri.

Cameron Bertalli is pouring a pinot noir from Penbro Estate, his family’s vineyard in the Yea Valley north of Melbourne. You wouldn’t necessarily think such a rootsy vintage would fit the bill – Bertalli’s great great grandfather Guiseppe first planted vines in Australia in 1860 after emigrating from Italy – but somehow it meshes with the flavors perfectly.

Table volume rises as the dishes and the wine go around. Yvonne, Shanghainese, is talking about her English boyfriend to the American chef of a diner-style restaurant over in Xintiandi. (Pork roast, meatloaf, family-sized platters.) An Oglyvie ad-guy at the end of the table is on the phone. “The smartest local brands are building a base here first before going international,” he’s telling someone.

“How’re sales?” I ask Bertalli, who has just returned from Changzhou filling an order for the Iranian owners of a pizza chain.

Not bad, he says, although there are challenges selling their kind of product here. Penbro is handmade on a eco-sustainable 1500 acre farm that irrigates with rainwater. 80% of their Chinese customers have only used wine previously as a shooter after wedding toasts. Sprite and chardonnay. Coke and cabernet. “There’s some education involved.”

His comment throws light on the gathering. I had first thought of us sitting down to dine here together – with our intensely varied backgrounds, interests and plans – merely as a pinnacle expression of internationalism, that blending of the home and away experience which we referred to as Globalism in our last essay in this series.

But as the flavors and ideas and accents wing in from all corners of the globe at once, it occurs to me that an entirely new experience of mobility is being illuminated here in the low and groovy light. Azul Viva is not global. A place of expat and local mingling, a hugely popular retreat from the insane bustle of booming Shanghai but neither of the city nor of any single place outside it either, Azul Viva is post-global.

We head out into the fragrant Shanghai night – cooking oil, exhaust and the layers of human scent – up around the corner past the US Consulate into Fuxing Xi Lu to Lounge Tara 57 which is more like Vegas 1990. Pink gauzy curtains and curved red couches pulled into plush enclaves. Tequila sunrises and whiskey sours. The bartender pours the American chef absinthe, which glints green evil in the squat glass. Eduardo gets a White Sand, silky and white in a martini glass. “Lychee,” he announces, swallowing a large mouthful, then leaning over to speak.

“I’ve very famous in Peru, but…” he starts.

I sip my scotch and listen, which is what you do with men like Eduardo. Big guys, generous with their wisdom. He has 700 contacts in his PDA. Wine guys with cellars in old bomb shelters. Designers, architects and chefs. All the people converging here and turning this town into the new thing that it is becoming. All the people he wants me to meet.

Which I appreciate. Although at that moment – cigarette smoke spindling up into the slate light, the music pulsing, that endless House of night – I am also able to appreciate Eduardo and the whole scene around us as something rippling outward. A new experience of mobility, yes. But one that is steadily changing us all, wherever we live.

“…but if I were to do a Peruvian restaurant in Shanghai?” he continues, returning to a question I’d asked much earlier in the evening. “I’d do it only 5% Latino. Not just ceviche, but a raw bar. Serve lots of vodka. Peruvian, but more. Peruvian food for the masses. And everyone would come.”

He’s right too. Everyone would come. And not just for the raw dace carp, the Pertsovka infused with bhut jolokia “ghost” chilis. Eduardo’s culinary sensibility is tuned more subtly to a cultural moment, references to place never encumbered by nostalgia for roots. He feeds a population that is in constant restless motion both physically and in imagination. The masses. Expats thousands of miles from home in the newest hot spot on the planet. Locals with a suddenly exploding sense of what the world can offer.

So it is that the experience of Azul Viva seems not to stem from globalization at all – that wide distribution of previously ‘local’ ideas, that sense of a world where the distance between distinct places is shrinking. Instead, it seems to belong to something beyond locality itself, something beyond place.

It’s true of Shanghai more broadly too. You can read the phenomenon in the city’s architecture. In Pudong, with its space-age Oriental Pearl, its comic-book megalith, the 88 story Jinmao Tower. But through People’s Square and Jingan too, where every building bids for attention with a competitive architectural flourish: a canopy cantilevered out hundreds of feet above street level, a bold undulation in a curtain wall, a fifty story spray of green lighting. It’s a skyline that repudiates context, a cluster of drawing board ideas making as much intrinsic sense here as it would in Johannesberg, Dallas, Copenhagen.

“Shanghai wants what Hong Kong had in the eighties,” photographer Greg Girard tells me, squinting a little skeptically as he remembers his own years spent in that formerly frenzied hub of the post-national. “Shanghai wants it all.”

I find the phrasing astute. We’re sitting around the corner from the Starbucks in Xintiandi. The neighborhood is an old-world-styled boutique mall, built around a few square blocks of restored shikumen longtang brick houses. These structures were once ubiquitous, defining the Shanghai social landscape, but are now being plowed under by the acre to make room for the construction sites, for the new forest of towers.

Girard’s work has made this churning physical landscape one of its central concerns. In his newest book, Phantom Shanghai, a typical photograph depicts an exotic piece of rococo European architecture, poised in the moments before destruction, adrift in the rubble of its former neighborhood, while the gleaming spires and cranes of skyscraper-land catch sunlight in the distance. Here your view wraps up the vanished, the preserved, the emerging and the fait accompli, all in a single glance, all of these folding towards and around one another in a single ideogram that represents the Shanghai future.

And our own future more broadly, I find myself thinking, looking at Girard’s photography, or around myself in Xintiandi, or remembering Azul Viva. Because in this setting, where people and cultural ideas and degrees of freedom swirl endlessly, none of us are distinctly nomads or refugees, settlers or prisoners. The diagram of our experience wouldn’t bi-sect neatly into four compartments (as in modernism) or even yield up that one nomad/settler hybrid (as in globalism).

Our moment-to-moment experience in any one place, instead, becomes one of endless, complex combination of those mobility experiences: mobile and rooted, in situations chosen or forced upon us, in settings intensely varied in cultural tone or entirely familiar. Our position shifting as if in an infinite sphere of experiences, with every sight, every sound, every word exchanged, every flavor.

Certainly the intoxicating flux of international culture that is the Shanghai expat scene seems to reflect this new reality. “Basically any place is OK as long as you can leave,” Girard told me near the end of our conversation. As settled an expat as I will meet who yet betrays a trace of the prisoner-nomad axis with a crooked smile.

“9 years is an unusual length of time to have been here,” says Jennivine Kwan, echoing Girard in her own mixed feelings, her own sense of a potential plummet from freedom: “It’s the amount of time just before it’s too late.”

Kwan’s experience of mobility is even more layered than typical among expats here. Born to Chinese parents in Calgary, the 30 year old green building specialist adds the push and pull of an ethnic identity seemingly shared with her host country. Camouflaged by language and appearance, her cultural rhythms are tuned to the city in a way unavailable to most other expats I’ll meet, no matter how long they have stayed, no matter how perfect their mastery of the Shanghai hustle or the four tones of Chinese language.

But over lunch at a vegetarian mock-meat restaurant around the corner from the Shanghai Centre, Kwan candidly reveals the existential challenges for an outsider in a city going through change at this pace, no matter how insider you might appear. In fact she reveals a slow-growing yearning to move, to leave.

“The environment works on you,” she says, face to the window, her own features reflected against a sea of passing Shanghainese. “I bite my cheek a lot. People often say to me: welcome back to the motherland. I don’t say it, but the truth is: this isn’t my motherland.”

Imprisoned or adrift? Or ultimately free? That night I have dinner with a senior technology executive and come away with a parallel feeling. In Asia for over 10 years, his writes and speaks like a local. He negotiates our way into the busy Guyi Hunan Restaurant in Fumin Lu with a practiced patience. “Smile and repeat,” he says, with a slightly weary smile, on the topic of negotiating in Shanghai. “Never become upset.”

He bought a longtang house in Jinan himself. Gutted and architecturally reinvented. All Chinese tradition on the outside. All high-European modernism on the inside, concrete and tile and high end appliances. Beyond place.

“Yes, it is nice,” he says, when he takes me to see the space later. We stand in his small high-walled courtyard behind his house. An almost unheard of luxury in Shanghai terms, he even has a tiny lawn. Fifteen or twenty square feet of Kentucky Bluegrass. “Of course,” he continues, “Every time I find myself with nobody sitting around my dinner table, I have to wonder why I’m here.”

****

I end my visit the next day with an afternoon drink with Kwan and some of her work colleagues at the famous expat bar Malones. Here the post-place experience is given a North American pop-cultural sheen. Musical Youth on the stereo. Tip conscious Filipino wait staff. Coors Light. Pass the Dutchy on the left hand side…

Most of Kwan’s colleagues are near her age, but much less seasoned. And the mood is effusive, full of the excitement of the fresh experience. But even among these newest expats, a recognizable current flows. “After three years you lose your professional contacts,” says one knowing younger man, resigned to the sacrifices his stay here will represent. “After six years you lose your friends.”

Kwan will not be deflated today, however. She shares her latest good news in private. A request for a transfer to Chile has been granted. Off to Santiago. Better air quality, better snowboarding. And… tango!

“First thing we’re doing is finding a house,” she tells me, breathless. “Then a Latin dance club. Oh, I should have been born Latina.”

Which may well be true, I think, heading west again on the Yanan Dong Lu in a cab. Homeward bound myself and intensely grateful too. I’m just over my jetlag. Freed of my biorhythmic connection to home. My inner nomad is busting out all over and yet, and yet… I look up into the towering, competing architectural objects that fly past my window. I wonder whether I am envious of those I’ve met or truly relieved not to be one of them.

And then I realize that, of course, I am both. And as we inch to a standstill in gridlock traffic, imprisoned as we head down the off-ramp towards the tunnel, I look back, and up. And I see the most improbable thing. A kite. Flying way up there. At about the 60 floor level. Someone on a roof top somewhere, I think, smiling now. Someone feeling the enormous tug of invisible gusts, enormous forces. Someone pulled upward by complicated post-global forces and straining towards the sky.

I move around a fair bit with my work. And while I love encountering new places and, especially, meeting the people who make up those places and have been shaped by them in turn, I can’t deny that I generally also dislike leaving home. As a result, my attitude towards travel is conflicted. Indeed, it often gives rise to moments of inner turbulence.

On one level, this is the joint cultural inheritance I received from my parents. I’m the product of a mother and a father who had very different modern-era experiences of mobility, and who then adapted to these experiences with equivalently different survival techniques.

My father felt imprisoned by his provincial hometown, post-war Toronto. He reacted with a bid to be independent and free, which manifested itself in a strongly nomadic tendency has persisted until only quite recently. My mother, a half-Jew in wartime Germany, found herself homeless at the age of 12 and a refugee after the war. Her survival instinct, opposite to my father’s, was a powerful impulse to settle that lasted throughout her life.

The cross currents set up here certainly shaped the home dynamics of my childhood. My favourite illustration of this would be the highly eclectic Taylor household cuisine. My mother cooked pure “settler”, by which I mean we ate the stuff of her confiscated German childhood: spaetzle, rouladen, pickled herring and pumpernickel. My father meanwhile contributed impulse purchases, postcards from remembered places, from more nomadic times. I remember pomegranates, yams, chili peppers, eggplant, mangos. This was before the foodie era, remember. So it was notable that my mother took the ten pounds of fresh prawns he produced one weekend and turned them into an Ecuadorian ceviche, a dish from the place they had met, the house scoured out for days with an effluvial mist of onion, lime and Tabasco.

That was the hybrid household in which I was raised, settler and nomad impulses entirely blurred. And I guess you could say, based on this background, that my own mixed reactions to travel are easily enough explained.

As I reflect on it in the context of these essays on human mobility, however, it seems to me that that my modern-era family was in fact part of something going on much more widely. As we have shifted from the “modern” to the “globalized” era, the entire Western experience of movement and stability, and the related sense of what is “home” and “away”, has radically changed. My parents were only doing what millions of others were doing across the West as a matter of human reflex, struggling to release themselves from involuntary settings. But pushing towards self-determination, these people also naturally tended towards new ways of living that compensated for the specific lack of freedom they had experienced. Thus the refugee and her dreamed-of roots. The prisoner and his vision of movement, space, wind in the hair.

Over the course of the late twentieth century in the West, meanwhile – and this is true in North America, Western Europe and Australia – we have been the destination of choice for wave after wave of nomads and refugees seeking to act out their self-determination in settings most amenable to that mindset. Some of these migrants we have produced ourselves internally – the Second World War is a pretty good example of that phenomenon. Many have also entered from other parts of the world.

But my point here is that in aggregate these refugees and nomads pouring into the democracies of the West have carried with them the adaptive techniques to which they owed their survival. The refugee’s new celebration of roots was the reason for her thriving, just as the prisoner found identity and direction in his embrace of movement. Those strategies, to speak of it in evolutionary terms, were selected. They were the behavioral adaptations that had been proven successful. And in the West, they have become legacy qualities, mingled in the cultural genetics.

So has globalization given birth to a new mobility archetype, a hybrid nomad/settler which, in keeping with the four archetypes of mobility we’ve established in this series, you could model as follows:

There will be hardly a person who reads this – particularly among those who do so mid-flight – for whom the characterization won’t be immediately familiar in their own life. We blend home and away to meet our various needs, so much so that home and away seem almost contiguous spaces. Travelers on business voyage far afield, some of you for epic stretches of time I know. Accumulated professional person years are spent in place-less locations of transition: airports, hotel conference rooms and the like. But come the weekend, there is our road warrior in his or her backyard, barbecuing something nice picked up at the weekend farmer’s market, chatting with friends about new restaurants in Dubai or wherever they’ve been. There is no huge culture shock in this, for either the one who’s been away or the one who has stayed home. We know and live these patterns. We assume them. Tourism may offer the even more strident proof, where the heroic has become almost routine. Traffic jams on the way up to Macchu Pichu. Wait lists at Everest. And, in either cases, summit experiences that may well include a phone call home.

That shrinking of the distances will be fairly obvious to most of us. But the hybrid experience of mobility also points to a more significant evolution in the way we experience movement and cultural variation. During the modern era, our nomads and refugees crossed a world on which culture was associated with particular places. Culture might be thought of as having been painted onto the landscape itself. For those in motion, these cultural colors changed (the nomadic ideal). For those stationary, the cultural color was stable (the holy grail of settlement).

In the hybrid settler/nomad experience, however, that relationship between culture and geographic location has been largely de-coupled. Yes we combine a more fluid sense of what is home and what is away. But we also do so in an environment where the culture we experience in moving place to place is as unrooted as we are. So we can carry “home” with us when we go “away”, but so to can the away find us more readily in our homes and change our experiences there.

It’s as if a new dimension has been added to the set of possible mobility experiences. It can be visualized easily by approaching our model of mobility types from a different angle.

Here we see that within the hybrid nomad/settler experience, where elements of home and away are continually blended, there are in fact distinct variant experiences possible. Four potential combinations of cultural variance (high or low) and physical mobility (high or low). High cultural variance and high mobility. High cultural variance with low mobility. Low cultural variance with low mobility. And low cultural variance with high mobility. Four blends, in other words, of the cultural sense of being home or away and the physical reality of whether you are or not.

You probably won’t have to look very far to illustrate these variants. My own life tends to deal up them up in steady rotation. A travel experience – walking barley fields in the Wicklow hills recently, for example – delivers up a genuine sense of having journeyed far away from home, away from the culturally familiar. But these experiences are followed within days by the sense of being almost entirely at home, in this case having traveled just 30 minutes north to the city of Dublin.

Returning home to the the West Coast, meanwhile, my sense of home and away immediately wheel around to the inverse side of this equation. As is my normal pattern, I’m at first overwhelmed with the sense of home, capable suddenly of rhapsodic lyricism on the topic of cherry trees, salty sea breezes, the smell of fir and pine. All of which transitions in a couple of days back to  thinking of the far away, planning for that fall trip to Shanghai.

This cycle will repeat itself, of course. We yo-yo back and forth from home, our feelings about where we are yo-yo-ing some half-cycle lag behind us. That’s the pattern of contemporary life, the experience of being who we are now. But the way this idea is brought home to me more frequently is in observing how in each different place, you may now encounter all four of these same experiences simultaneously.

I can illustrate this with another trip I took recently, which in keeping with the notion here, took me very far away while not traveling very far away at all. I found myself out in Richmond on the Number Three Road, the other day. This part of Vancouver, known as the “Golden Village” is rarely recommended in the guidebooks, but should be. Vancouver’s new Chinatown, outstripping by many orders of magnitude the size and commercial zeal of the old one.

Although “Chinatown” is actually not quite the right word for it. The area is more like an “Asiatown”, a trading pit of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Filipino retail activity. A district of people who have carried their sense of home to this new place, which would have been very “away” to them when they arrived, and which has since been refashioned into a new “home”. All the while the air is full of new arrivals, the sky glinting aluminum as the underbellies of Jumbos and 767s streak overhead, inbound for YVR.

Here, as my father would have done before me, I was soon seeking out my culinary souvenirs. Dumplings, I fixed upon mentally. And dumplings I did find. Shanghainese, Singaporean. Dim sum, duk pukki, wonton, gyoza. I brought home a Pan-Asian Parliament of dumplings that were then boiled and steamed and microwaved according to the instructions on the back of each package.

And then we sat down to feed, my boy and I. Happy nomads in the heart of our own household. Home at home. Away at home. Either way, tucked in at the diningroom table. Chive shrimp (Chinese) I believe to be the winner. I chopsticked one of these into a mixture of soy and rice vinegar, green onion and sesame oil, then held it across the table for my son to eat.

“Well?” I said. “Tell me. What do you think of that?”

But he didn’t answer. He was back to eating his own dumplings. He was eating Shanghainese pork dumplings as if he had been born to do so.

There is a slightly embarrassing story my mother used to like to tell about me. It dates from 1965 when I was not yet two. That was the year my nomadic family moved back to Canada after years abroad to settle in West Vancouver. We’d lived in Venezuela prior to that point, where I’d been born in the town of San Tome, the last of five kids. Oil brats, as they used to say, since my father was an engineer with the Mene Grande Oil Company.

The move from South America had been a challenge for my parents. Five kids from 1 to 8 years of age, 13 pieces of luggage. We’d had long stopovers in Washington and Toronto. My mother had given my two eldest brothers a sedative, the sixties-era best wisdom on how to travel with feisty boys. The drugs had kicked in to completely opposite effect turning them into town drunks. 20 hours in planes with a 5 and 7 year old wandering up and down the aisles singing Johnny Appleseed or whatever it was. And even arriving in Vancouver, the move wasn’t over. We first stayed in a motel under the Lions Gate Bridge, then in rented digs in Burnaby where everyone but my father came down with the mumps.

All told, it was 217 days later that the family Volkswagen Bug finally pulled into the driveway of our new house on Madrona Crescent in West Vancouver and we all piled out to the amusement of curious neighbors. Tucking us all into our beds and cribs that night, I can only imagine how fatigued my parents must have been, how intensely, existentially relieved they must have felt to finally have a permanent roof over their heads and a bed waiting for them at the end of the hallway.

However they felt, I apparently didn’t. Because that night, having kept my peace throughout the long move, I started wailing. And I kept wailing. All night. And the next night. And the next night. I took breaks during the day, but otherwise kept it up for a week, sitting on the end of my parents’ bed. The eighth night I stopped wailing and fell asleep, my point apparently made.

I was reminded of this incident recently, reading an article by Harvard English Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt. In the piece, Greenblatt suggests a worthwhile new area of inter-disciplinary study might be “mobility studies”, which would examine the “restless and often unpredictable movements” of people in our mobile age. Greenblatt argues, among other things, that while we typically assume culture to be something dependent on a group of rooted citizens – an identifiable “people” living in a defined, stationary “home” – perhaps the truth is different. Perhaps culture is something shaped in a more fluid environment entirely.

In the context of history and pre-history, this point certainly seems a reasonable one. When homo erectusambled out of Africa into Eurasia about a million years ago, an inextinguishable human trait was foreshadowed. We drift around. We follow our impulses, urgent and whimsical as they may be. In North America, where European migrations began only in the late fifteenth century, this phenomenon may have played out to the fullest degree. But the patterns of human movement are literally the patterns of human history. We journey as a matter of genetic imperative, ending up in different places as different people than where and when we began.

That the pace of all this to-ing and fro-ing has risen dramatically since Industrialization is equally clear. Population migrations have shaped the developed world over the same period of time that technology – in transportation and communications – has radically reduced the barriers to such movement. We now mingle in obvious and subtle ways. You might ask yourself – reading this article on your way by air to or from some destination – how you contribute to a complicated web of cultural forces. Whether you’re a tourist, business person, student, artist or a person visiting a relative who lives far enough away that you must fly, the things you leave behind as you travel – your dollars, your opinions, tastes and ideas – change the places you visit just as you are changed by the things you carry home, including the very idea of what home itself should be. Every seat on your flight today, meanwhile, is occupied by somebody contributing to this effect in a different way and Greenblatt’s “mobility studies” probably have merit for reasons of that complexity alone.

For me, however, it’s personal history that opens a view into this topic. My parents came together as a product of mobility, both having traveled long routes to their unlikely meeting place in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Very different routes too. My mother was a half-Jewish German who’d spent much of the Second World War in hiding and whose family had reunited post-war in Ecuador where her Jewish father had been waiting for them since getting a single exit visa in 1940. My father, by contrast, was an engineering grad from the U of T, bored with the imprisoning provinciality of 1940’s Toronto, out seeking his fortune. They met on August 22, 1953, but had both already been in motion for years. My mother, traveling against her will throughout Germany and then to South America post-war. My father, responding to his own whims and desires, had seen Manila, the Philippine jungle, Hong Kong, Paris, New York and Caracas by that point.

What their experience leads me to believe about mobility studies is that the link between culture and movement isn’t much illuminated by considering only the amount we travel. You’re reading this article aboard a busy flight, some way between two even busier terminal buildings. So too my parents, post-war, were merely two of an estimated 20 million individuals thought to be to be in transition from a former home to a new one. What has to be considered instead – and what could teach us something about how mobility has affected our ideas of home and community, and how these effects are evolving over time – is the degree of our mobility measured against the degree to which that mobility is voluntary.

That approach breaks the universe of mobility experience into four archetypes as follows:

Nomads wander by choice, while the refugee is cast adrift in the world. Settlers happily put down roots, while prisoners (of the law or of circumstance) are restrained unwillingly. Treated as distinct ways that mobility may be experienced, these archetypes characterize the world in which my mother and father were traveling. But the tensions between the quadrants, the yearning of one type to become another, were also critical in defining that “modern” era of mobility. I can illustrate this idea with two events from my parents’ respective journeys. I play them simultaneously in memory, since they both happened in 1948 although on directly opposite sides of the globe. (10,629 miles apart, to be precise, which is about 43% of the circumference of the earth.)

In the first, my mother (with her mother and sister) is about to be reunited with her father in Guayaquil after eight years of living through bombing raids, persecution and hiding, and finally as a post-war refugee. After delays in Paris and Genoa, she’s finally completed the Atlantic crossing, during which she sat on a coiled rope on the after deck and watched her European life evaporate with the foam of the wake. She’s seen Caracas and Curacao, felt her first tropical nights, the air rich and velvety on the skin. And now she stands at the rail of the aptly named Marco Polo, staring up the hillside of this unknown city, this unknown continent, this unknown personal future. She has just glimpsed her father bobbing towards them in the launch, and as the birds rise over the Isla Puna she asks herself: what will become of me here?

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, my father is aboard his own ship, a naval surplus minesweeper he’s purchased at Subic Bay for sale to a Hong Kong businessman he’s agreed to meet in Manila. The short trip south, however, has been a problem from the start. They nearly lost the ship in a typhoon at anchor. Leaving Subic they’d been stopped by Coast Guard looking for exit papers which they didn’t have (my dad presented a gas receipt, which seemed to do the trick). They’d had tiller and engine problems en route putting them into Manila much later than expected, the light failing. Entering the top of the harbor – slipping in past the Bataan Peninsula, where 75,000 Filipino and American soldiers had surrendered to the Japanese just six years before – they find a harbor full of dangerous, sunken wreckage. And so my father’s voyage ends with him also at the ship’s rail, staring into the dark waters, watching the masts and superstructures of sunken ships below, calling back instructions to his friend at the wheel: starboard, port, OK forward. Stop! Slowly creeping through.

Times of nervous anticipation for both parties, naturally. But what these meshed stories illustrate, to my mind, are the tensions and yearnings at work between those modern mobility archetypes. The prisoner of Nazi Germany, freed to become a refugee, now contemplates settlement as a matter of core disposition. Likewise, the former prisoner of a provincial birth place fights his way over any challenge to his continued freedom, ever conscious that a new home might be unexpectedly found in the process. These are mirroring forces, which may be shown on our four quadrant diagram as follows:

But these are also the internal tensions I now understand to have driven the events of my life as it has followed. The movement of my parents towards one another, towards Ecuador and then Venezuela and then five kids and that final, long and arduous trip to Vancouver that ends with me crying at the foot of their bed saying, in effect, enough is enough. No more nomad, no more refugee. I want to be a settler!

Telling sentiments from the two year old version of myself, because I remain a settler to this day, even returning to Vancouver after my family had all moved to Alberta. And although I do not live what appears to be a settled life – all but my immediate family is dispersed, my work is scattered all over, taking me to Toronto, Costa Rica and Shanghai in the past few months – I now also understand this to be a product of the diagram above. Because those tensions, those tendencies and yearnings that defined the modern era of mobility, have also pushed us onward to further necessary distortions of the four basic archetypes. I’ll be exploring these in two coming articles, the evolution represented by my own globalized era, and the evolution I anticipate for the post-globalized era to be inherited by my own three year old son.

But I won’t close before offering a final image from the modern era behind us. From my father’s life, naturally enough. He’d become a settled Albertan after moving there in his early fifties. And that was what he remained until only very recently when, having lost my mother early last year, a telling transformation has taken place. He announced he wanted to buy a second home in Vancouver, so he could visit and go for walks. Then he shifted focus to Victoria. Then, a couple weeks back, he shifted focus again. He’s thinking about a camper van now. “I could drive around,” he explained to me. “I could stop here and there. See a lot of different places.”

Which was an idea to which I might have reasonably objected, given he’s 84 years old. But I didn’t say anything. I suddenly understood that this impulse had everything to do with mobility. Specifically, that the true site of his settlement hadn’t been a place at all, but a person, a 52 year marriage. And without my mother, my father had in some ways been returned to a previous ordering of things in life, some element of himself necessarily re-mobilized, certain impulses of the modern nomad reawakened.

PART THREE: BRAND NEW WORLD, December 2006

My mother took a conservative position on toys: Less was better, in part because you should be outside playing anyway. I might have preferred a different approach. But now that I have a two-year-old boy and toys are again on my radar, I see the wisdom of my mother’s old-world view.

It’s partly a matter of self-preservation. Toy marketing has grown devious. Television tie-ins are standard. There are strategic alliances between toys (Duplo and Bob the Builder, for example), which try to create complex multi-toy-group dependencies. But my larger concern is for my son.

We visited a big toy store recently. He wanted a baseball and bat. But to my surprise, his happy chatter faded to silence as we wandered past the Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob gear, the toys pitching Marvel, Pixnar and Nickleodeon content. Then, as his breathing quickened with anxiety, it dawned on me. With the possible exception of the plastic bat and ball we never found, no toy in the store was designed merely as a vehicle for imagination. Instead, every toy was pre-freighted with brand story, all of which were all being yelled at us simultaneously.

Which is right about the point my son asked to go home. I wasn’t having a great time, but the experience was actually making him unhappy.

***

Happiness or, more precisely, unhappiness in the face of consumer plenty – this is where I find myself after three years of writing about branding in these pages. I suppose it was inevitable from the moment I introduced the Boutique Individual, a personality type whose very sense of self is derived from the brands he consumes.

“Today, what consumers want to buy the most is identity,” wrote Emilie Lasseron in a paper published by the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy last year. Which vindicates my point about the existence of the Boutique Individual phenomenon, but also raises a more important question: When identity is a commercial product, what brand promise is either upheld or broken in the transaction?

The answer is happiness. Lasseron suggests as much when she argues that brands now offer an alternate way to articulate who we are and forestall the “disorientation and uncertainty” that might otherwise arise from the loss of traditional institutions – church, town hall, extended family – in which identity was once constructed. And there is a growing community of political consultants who agree, having built an industry to measure happiness scientifically. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness project was the original, attempting to measure public contentment, peace with the environment and harmony between neighbors. But we now also have the Happy Planet Index of the New Economics Foundation, the World Map of Happiness as developed by the University of Leicester, the happiness rankings of the World Values Survey, and a Canadian Index of Wellbeing coming soon from the Atkinson Foundation.

These macroeconomic indices arise from a conviction that economic data, such as GDP, doesn’t measure our progress toward the ultimate deliverable: personal well-being and happiness. But its also an increasingly popular view, judging from the fact that kids’ entertainer Raffi has written a song on the topic. “Counting indiscriminately / That’s what’s wrong with the GDP / Counting only the mo-oney / Makes no sense to me…”

Which is ironic since most people wouldn’t choose to define themselves in purely consumerist terms (“counting only the mo-oney”). Yet our voracious need for identity didn’t vanish when we dismantled those illiberal institutions that once defined us. So it is that great swathes of the secular West are forced into reliance on consumer markets for lack of other cultural means of expression. Consumerism, for many, is the only language that remains.

Which is precisely why corporations speak to Boutique Individuals in “Corporate Stories”, using toy store-like brand narratives to sell the vacation homes and luxury cars of adult play. It’s why consumers express themselves with “Personal Branding”, presenting themselves as if for sale. And it’s ultimately way, when Boutique Individuals talk to themselves, asking if their brand is delivering as promised to themselves, they ask the questions of the happiness industry. Not: Am I living a good life? Or: Have I done the right thing? But: Am I happy? What would make me more happy?

Perhaps this is what evolution intended for us, although that would be discouraging given how the Boutique Individual’s quest for happiness seems to make him so unhappy. Dozens and dozens of recent books are fattening the pockets of the happiness industry. And as Darrin McMahon writes in Happiness: A History, “The very prevalence of these titles is a sign that all is not well.”

I agree, particularly after sampling some popular books and having found them to disseminate advice in only three counterproductive categories: painfully obvious, simplistic to the point of being useless or simplistic to the further point of being dangerous. The Happiness Makeover, Stumbling on Happiness, Authentic Happiness, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill… I’m not criticizing this literature only because it’s badly written and ill-conceived. The point, rather, is that the quest for personal happiness, played out in the marketplace of Boutique Individuality, is wholly self-defeating.

I have two reasons for believing so. The first relates to ends and means. As philosopher Roger Scruton has written, the West has become very good at “means” (ways to do things), while getting much worse at “ends” (reasons for doing things). We’ve stroked old beliefs off the cultural books, in other words, without any balancing double entry. And while we might try to solve this problem by denominating every human activity in the currency of happiness – I’m doing this to find my happiness. I need this to be happy – we would do so only at a terrible cost. Because if every activity were a means to that same end – every conversation, dog walk or job well done valued only in terms of the personal happiness derived – then no activity would have intrinsic value. Certainly no action would be justifiable on the basis of social custom or personal sacrifice alone. And while nihilists will be content with this situation, those interested in meaning and community will be less so. “Measuring the things that matter,” promises the Canadian Index of Wellbeing. “Economics as if people and the planet mattered,” echoes the Happy Planet Index. What matters. What has meaning. This articulation is important, sketching an emptiness that the indices then struggle to make concrete.

And it’s that same emptiness that underlines my second reason for questioning whether Boutique Individuality, obtained on the open market, can ever deliver on its brand promise of happiness. Because at the heart of every commercial market, you find the steady pulse of demand. It is satisfied through purchase, yes. But then it is renewed. Indeed, people generally attain more only to develop a taste for still more. That insatiability is the escalator on which human progress has ascended to this point. But it’s one thing to be dissatisfied with your apartment, knowing that if you had a larger one, you’d set your sights still higher. It’s quite another thing to be aware of your Self as a source of the same endless dissatisfaction, something that must be traded up, and up again. The fading of those old institutions that bequeathed identity is an emancipation, certainly. But just as certainly, many now find themselves unhappily in new chains.

A familiar refrain to those who remember their high-school Huxley, in whose Brave New World, endless pleasure came only at the expense of happiness, just as suffering was banished only by banishing joy. Less familiar might be Huxley’s prescient words from the forward to the 1946 edition of the book: “The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and participating scientists will call ‘the problem of happiness’ – in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.”

In forecasting global totalitarianism, Huxley was wrong about the type of servitude. But it takes only a modest adjustment of his anti-utopian vision to see our Boutique Individuals as enslaved in the world they have made, this Brand New World.

After the toy store, the beach. This is how, in our Vancouver-based family, an agitated kid is reset on even keel. No toys but shells, sticks, rocks. And we fill these with our imagination, telling our stories, creating meaning by doing no more than finding starfish and crabs, throwing driftwood for the dog.

My mother, whose views on toys and life have been so important to me, passed away on March 31, 2006. Community for me, of course, was irrevocably changed. But on the beach, two continuing connections flash to mind as my dog pounds into the surf. As a leather-brown old-timer makes his way through the barking dogs and yelling kids and smiling adults to slip into the waves, to breaststroke smoothly out into the bay.

In the first connection, I sense the land tipping off and sliding under the water, and just as life is a thing passed between generations, the beach suggests how everything visible continues on seamlessly into everything that is invisible. In the second connection, as my old guy disappears into the high waves, I consider all of us remaining on this beach. We may have stripped our culture of its old machinery for the creation of identity. We may have left ourselves with a culture of hollow brand promise, endless satisfaction of appetites that remain un-sated, endless pleasure to those who remain, at core, unhappy.

But we’ve done nothing to alter our urgent need for one another, lined up as we are along these two axes. Those of us on this beach, in the now. And those arranged beyond us, having gone before us or waiting to come after. And to understand ourselves – our Selves – at the intersection of those two lines is to break the imprisoning grip of Boutique Individuality. Perhaps even to regain a way of living that carries, if not the promise, the possibility of community, of meaning, and – if we look away, if we leave it in our peripheral vision – of happiness itself.