Movement and stillness. When we issued a call for essays dealing with movement and stillness, we were still in the first year of the current global pandemic. Our world of hyper-accelerated mobility seemed to have ground to a sudden halt, with borders closed, skies empty. The virus had thrived on movement; the antidote, it seemed, was stillness. Now, well into the second half of 2021, a slow return to mobility seems to be underway, and with it a tentative confidence to indulge our restlessness once again. And yet, with new variants and fresh waves of infection, the specter of further lockdowns and restrictions remains. It is in this moment of ongoing tension between movement and stillness that we are publishing a selection of themed travel essays in this, the inaugural issue of Adventures in Ideas.
The essays you’ll read in Issue 1 – Movement and Stillness are about much more than pandemics and lockdowns. They are about memory and the search for meaning, reflection and the discovery of truth. They take us across Greenland’s ancient glaciers and into the heart of ageing. They bring us to reflect on the spiritual waters of Lake Baikal and on the wailing horn of a passing train in San Francisco. They immerse us into the precincts of a Buddhist temple in Thailand and take us through the pages of the books we read while traveling. Five writers from around the world share with us their own journeys, and reveal the imaginative possibilities of the strange space between movement and stillness in which we all now exist.
We hope you enjoy the essays. Thanks for reading.
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The Editors