Monday 19 August 2024
“Where are you going for vacation?” a curious friend might ask. In other words, what is your destination? And usually their follow-up question might be: “Why there?”
The etymology of “vacation” is straightforward enough: “freedom from obligations; a release from some occupation;” moreover, “vacation’s” word origin also stems from vacare: “to be empty, free… to leave, abandon, or give out.” “Vacation” carries the sense of disconnecting with our work life or of detaching ourselves from our hectic, everyday troubles.
However, “destination’s” etymology is even more intriguing. “Destination” comes from destinare, meaning “to make firm, establish;” it also means “the action of intending someone or something for a purpose,” even “being destined for a place.” I’m drawn to the last etymological explanation: destiny.
Therefore, do we consciously or deliberately choose the destinations we travel to, or do the destinations mysteriously or mystically choose us, beckoning us to visit them? Are we destined to go to… (in my case, the Russian Miednoje and Katyn Forests) … Paris, Tokyo, Marrakesh, or Kathmandu? Does Cairo call out to us, directing us to visit the Sphinx? Does the Sphinx itself command us to visit it?
After recently completing the revision of my Katyn book manuscript, I have now been reflecting upon the forces and motivations that prompt us, perhaps even guide us, to the places we end up visiting.
As a child, I often dreamed that one day I would visit Rome; so far, I have travelled twice to Rome. I’m planning to go to Rome again… someday. During my first visit to Rome’s Trevi Fountain, like other tourists, I faced away from the fountain and tossed a coin over my shoulder, quickly turning around to watch the coin hoovering mid-air and then plunging into the fountain’s water, thus assuring, as the legend goes, that I would return to Rome.
Twenty-plus years later, I discovered that the myth is true; throwing a coin into Trevi Fountain does work, at least for me it did. I returned to Rome, and, of course, I eagerly threw another coin, making sure I would return for a third time. A silly, unscientifically proven wish but it did… eventually… prove to be true. I did come back to Rome. Was it destiny?
I don’t know if the universe has predetermined that I shall return to the Trevi Fountain; however, did the universe want me to travel to the forests of Russia? Was going to Katyn my destiny, my intended fate? Now, posing that question isn’t so silly or new age-like.
And, in a way, after my experience at West Point… my interaction with Kościuszko’s spirit who lingered about the American miliary post and academy there and who commanded me that I must “remember Katyn,” thus sending me to the Katyn Massacres sites, I feel (and believe) that the universe did direct me to the Miednoje and Katyn Forests. How else do I make sense of why I went to Russia twice as a scholar to visit the sites where the Katyn Massacres took place? Going to Russia was more than just curiosity. Was going to Russia my destiny?
I’m not sure whether going to Miami earlier this year was my destiny; however, the universe, it seems, had prepared a path which led me to Katyn Forest. Why? How do I know that the universe decided for me to go there? Well, when I ultimately publish my Katyn book, you can read my answers to those questions and others then.