Note: This is just a result of me spilling my mind, nothing more, nothing less. It explains why I travel and offers a little philosophy on the intersection of travel and life. I include it here not to advertise myself or say that I’m right and I have it all figured out, which I don’t, but rather as a reference that someone will hopefully find interesting. It’s just my perspective, the train of thought that runs through my mind before I hop a plane to another unknown place in the world. It shouldn't be taken too seriously. Maybe you'll think I'm a little less crazy though. Hope you enjoy it
Having a Purpose
Why?
This is the most important question in the universe. Why ____? The more you ask this question, and the more you think about the answers, the better your life gets.
The world is full of people telling you what to do, telling you what you want, where to go, and how to think. It happens so often every day that few people even notice. At it’s most benign, an ad will tell you that you really want a Coke. At it’s worst, the constant flow of society will spell out your entire life for you. Think about how a typical life plays out today, then think about the scale of ‘typical’.
It’s huge.
I’m not saying that everybody needs to be a radical. I’m not saying that everybody is unsatisfied with their life. What I am saying is that if everybody started asking themselves ‘Why’ a little more often, instead of going with the default answer, maybe they could find opportunities to do more and become a little more satisfied with the quality of their journey.
Isn’t that worth the effort of asking yourself a few questions?
Travel
One of the reasons I travel, maybe the single most important reason, is that it puts the question and answer cycle in overdrive. Real travel knocks you off your butt. Your life is no longer on autopilot. Your world is no longer familiar. Almost everything that makes up your life at home - your habits, your connections, your mindset, etc. - gets torn down and you are forced to rebuild.
When that happens, when your house gets torn down, you start to see yourself a little clearer. When it’s 5 am and your bus drops you off in a completely new city, and maybe you don’t understand the language or culture well or at all, how do you react? When you’ve settled into a new place and you have a lot of time all to yourself, what do you do? When you don’t know anybody within a thousand mile radius, can you get by? New and experienced travellers alike have to learn how to learn on the fly and adapt quickly. Sometimes you impress yourself and do well, and some other times you break down. Sometimes the challenge is greater than you anticipated, and sometimes the new world isn’t so different after all. If you can keep trying and keep improving, you will start to trust yourself more and you will learn how to learn, which is an invaluable skill in itself.
Every time you go through another rebuilding phase, you have a chance to improve. If your house burned down and you were to rebuild it, you would probably change a few things. Maybe you would expand the porch, move the kitchen to a better spot, and eliminate an unused room. It’s the same way with your metaphorical house. Keep testing, keep rebuilding, and keep improving.
Travel can also provide new answers, new ways of building if you will, that you might not have thought of otherwise. And fortunately, it’s often easier to re-organize your metaphorical house than your real house.
But not always, and this is another place where I think people could benefit tremendously by doing a little homework. Learning how to learn is a great start, but it then has to be applied. If you can learn to be flexible and open to change in everything you do, you can keep improving yourself as you go. Unfortunately, I believe that being flexible is something that everyone is born with but a lot of people eventually lose.
Travelling around isn't for everyone, and there are a lot of other ways to improve your life by asking, answering, and applying ‘why’. For me though, it’s the most efficient, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun. I think It’s more than worth the price of indigestion, insomnia, and occasional embarrassment.
Dondequiera vayas, les deseo un buen viaje
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