What I’ve learned after visiting 50 countries.
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart” — Confucius
We all love to travel. We believe we can feed our soul and heart through our journeys exploring the world. Walking down some cobblestone path we believe we might just find the fresh perspective to rethink our life or to find our inner purpose. The reality is that travel is more of an escape from the routine and tasks of daily life. We spend our days distracted wandering around far from the worries of our real lives back home. We never actually find the time to ponder or question our being and merely roam around like free souls with no agenda and not a worry in the world. We always have to come home and face the daunting feeling of a trip that has come to an end.
As a global traveller from a very young age, here are some of my perspectives on travel.
It’s a small world, after all!
“There are no foreign lands, it is only the traveler who is foreign” — Robert Louis Stevenson
After spending time in numerous countries from Mexico to Thailand, as humans we are all fundamentally running around trying to find our purpose. We may speak different languages, eat different food and dress differently but at the heart of it, every human is very similar in their quest for this life. While we immerse ourselves in the new cultures and landscapes, at the heart of our travel when we dine at a restaurant or stop by a cafe to grab a coffee, it can almost seem like you’re back at home, albeit with a different surrounding. People still pulling up PowerPoints on their laptops as you walk past cafes, bicycles speeding down the streets, the chatter of millennials on FaceTime and the sounds of crying babies out for a morning stroll with their mammas. It all feels so known. There is nothing truly foreign about our experience except that we are not local to the place. The more you travel the more the differences start to blur and travel doesn’t derive the same meaning it did before. Don’t get me wrong — I love exploring new countries and still have plenty to do on my bucket list but at the end of the day if you’re trying to find something exotic to completely bring you into a fairytale land chances are there will be plenty in any foreign surroundings to remind you about the life that is common to us all.
The curse of being connected
Ever visit a famous landmark only to find hundreds of other tourists rushing around taking pictures by the dozen? Ever notice that those same people see the place through their camera first and very often don’t even take a moment to admire the beauty once they have stopped taking their pictures? They never actually capture any of the moment through their own eyes. It seems to be a race to show and tell. Let me tell you, if this is how you travel you may as well just stay at home. Travelling is not done to say you went there or did that. It is to experience the moments of surreal beauty and vivid contrasts to what we have at home. It is when one is truly present away from their devices — sipping coffee or smelling the fragrances of a new place are you really in a new dimension.
Your mind and habits will stay with you
“Travel not to find yourself but to remember who you have been all along” — Anonymous
By nature I enjoy being a perfectionist. I like to enjoy things a certain way, eat a certain way and have my meals a certain way. Whenever I go on holiday, I mistakenly believe that I will not worry about the way I want things and just go with the flow. By design our habits will always stick with us regardless of where we are. I’ll be busy organizing my belongings in my hotel room before heading out for the day, sticking to my desire for orderliness. If you’re travelling with family and have a short fuse when spending copious amounts of time together, expect that it will be the same when away. It is the same people albeit in a different surrounding. Don’t expect a long flight and living in a nice hotel to change who you are. If you are an anxious person at home, you’ll be an anxious person abroad. Travel shapes your experiences, influences your perspectives and broadens your horizons but it is not an express path to instantly change yourself. That requires hard work.
You still need a place to call home
We all know it, that dreaded feeling on the last day of a trip. Time to go home, back to work, back to routine and no more fun in the sun. We enjoy being away from our troubles and duties back at home. No matter how many places you visit, there must always be one home. Even if you decided to change your home and move to somewhere you fell in love with during your travels, it would lose that same appeal as the place you had once visited. The reality is home is where routine, chores and work occurs and it isn’t associated with what travel means to us. No matter where you go in life, it is important to have a place you feel grounded and have a strong sense of community in. It should have the right balance of what appeals to you whether that be urban or countryside, have warmer or colder climates and where you feel you belong. That feeling of belonging is what will always make you want to come back each time no matter how amazing your trip is!
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” — Marcel Proust
