Why we travel?

The book Places in Between by Rory Stewart is restoring my faith in the genre called "Travel". I was thinking to myself that we should have opened the course with this book, but then I realized that maybe I needed to have this book second. Possibly this book found me and not the other way around. This book was floating in the cosmos calling my name, and I came to it as it came to me. There was one section of the book where Rory just puts his head to the ground and treks it hard. I really enjoyed this section because it said something to me about human nature (actually a few things). The first being that nothingness can be achieved by any sort of harmonious action with our fellows or nature on this planet. Then the question arises as to why we desire this feeling so much? It could possibly be that we spend all of our days being stretched and squashed so much that we become amorphous blobs by absolution. Rory is tapping into the infinite in this scene because it's all that we can do. It's our only defense against indecision, unknowing, the unending rational strain of the question. The other point that it brings up in my mind is our desire to stay fluid, in flux. I believe that this physicality of our desire to constantly be transcending. If the universe is in fact "as above, so below" and our corporeal houses are a microcosm of the stars, then why not mirror the constant ascension of consciousness within our substance. So we stay moving, we stay seeking/searching. Searching for what? Avalon, a place that we knew before the Fall. One thing that I have become fairly convinced of is that Avalon cannot be located on any earthly plane. So Rory's (and others) venture becomes a pleasant diversion without any real metaphysical backing. The Kingdom of Heaven is inside us all. Mason Jennings has a lyric which says, "Now when I say I search for God, I mean I search for peace." In this case the word "peace" and the word God become metonomic. Which is a beautiful way of phrasing the entire thing I think; in eastern thought it is often called Nirvana (a state of eternal calm). Nirvana is non-locality, which is definately a much more plausible end than the Sugar-candy-mountain that is the occidental Heaven. So why do we travel? We're trying to locate this paradise that has always been within us, if we could simply open our eyes. Question two: if we understand that this place of peace exists within us, then why do we propagate suffering? Why do we feed off of it like vampyres? I don't know, and I wish I did. Doystoyevsky said "Suffering is the origin of Consciousness", but I want to believe he was wrong. Yes it's true that when I am suffering I do feel very alive, but I feel even more alive in those moments of Inspiration that are unbounded, nameless. I think another reason for the solitary trek is the feeling of autonomy that we have. Thoreau said that he went into the woods because he "wished to live deliberately". That says so much for me. It means that we have to govern our slightest action, to not even pour a bowl of cereal unconsciously. If we allow the great grey beast of routine to control, then our lives will soar by us. I had a teacher once who told me that "the key to happiness is the cultivation of wonder in everyday life". We travel outwards because we do not yet comprehend how to travel inwards.