“What do you love about traveling?” A simple question that a friend–one who incidentally I’ve yet to meet in person–asked me a few weeks ago. The question is simple but the task of answering it was intimidating enough that I’ve yet to respond to her. What do I love about traveling? It seems I’d need to write a book to even attempt to answer this question and still I’d never do it justice. But here’s my attempt at a quick and dirty response.
“Traveling: It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a story teller.” -Ibn Battuta
So that’s the first thing. Traveling enriches your life by providing you with a wealth of experiences. Experiences you never would have gotten had you stayed home and not left the community you were raised in. And, armed with this wealth of experiences, you can go back to your community and impress people with stories of your exploits abroad and enrich their lives a little bit as well. So sure that’s part of it. I choose to be an educator largely because I love to help people understand things and see things in a new way. For me, being able to understand things is an extraordinarily gratifying experience and one I like to pass on to others. If we’re honest we can’t deny that we like to be able to impress others and traveling will certainly give you more stories to tell people at parties, but it’s the learning and understanding but that’s important to me; and it’s something I’ll come back to a little later.
FREEDOM!!! (Cue Mel Gibson’s scream at the end of the movie Braveheart) There’s something very freeing about being on the move for an extended period of time. For one, it forces you to leave most of your possessions behind because whatever you take you must carry (or at the very least squeeze into your car if you’re going on a road trip). This shows you that most of your possessions are not necessary, either for your survival or your happiness. There’s also something very liberating about waking up in the morning and not knowing where you’ll end up at the end of the week, or even the end of the day. The possibilities are endless and now you know you’re on a real adventure since part of what makes something an adventure to being with is the fact you you don’t know exactly what will happen or how it will feel.
The people. This is a big one. I love meeting other travelers. I find I get along with them very well and can develop friendships quickly and easily. It’s more of a jolt when I get back “home” and have to adjust to the new social context which feels more forced and constrained. I have to resist the urge to walk up to strangers who seem interesting and strike up a conversation for fear they’ll think I’m a weirdo.
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Beauty. The world is a beautiful place and if you don’t get out and travel you’ll only see the tiniest fraction of that beauty. I already resolved myself to the reality that as much as I travel, there will always be far more things of beauty than I will ever have the chance to see, but I still want to see as much as I can. As a photographer I love visiting beautiful places and then trying to capture that beauty so that I can share it for the enjoyment of others.
Learning. If there’s one thing that motivates me personally it’s learning and understanding. The more I understand about the world, its systems and societies, the people who inhabit it, and myself the more confident and competent I feel as a person. By traveling we learn things about the world that we would never learn from books or television. When we let experience be our teacher we receive lessons about people and cultures that we would never get from a lecture. We realize that people have reasons for their “strange” ways of doing things. We see that the way we live our lives is only one of many ways to live; none of them inherently better or worse than any other. It expands our perspective and we realize that there are other ways of thinking, doing, communicating, loving, having fun and expressing ourselves. And other ways to share our human experience.
Empowerment. For me, this is what it really comes down to. With learning comes choice, and with choice comes power. The power to transform our lives and our human experience. It’s very liberating and empowering to have the confidence that I could be dropped off pretty much anywhere in the world and I would find a way to survive. Thus far I’ve had to save up at least a bit of money in order to be able to travel for extended periods. However, my goal moving forward is to be able to travel and explore without seeing money as a constraint. From the experiences I’ve had myself and the things I’ve learned from other travelers, I know it’s possible to find a way to survive in almost any circumstance and I have the confidence that I possess the skills and intelligence to do so. And this is what I love about traveling more than anything else. It can show us the power and potential that we have within ourselves in a way that no other experience can. Thus I have always encouraged my students to travel because I believe the experiences they will have while traveling will expand their perspectives and empower them.
Here’s a collection of my travel photos, a collection which I hope will continue to grow.
