"Welcome to the world," nobody ever said to me. I had to say hello for myself.
When I was a kid the world seemed so unfathomably immense. In fact, I hardly even had a concept of how big my hometown was. I still remember getting lost on the way home from school in the first grade.
Growing into adulthood, I started to get a feel for bigger things, spatial and otherwise. I was sort of getting a handle on this responsibility stuff they'd been drilling into my head for years. But even when I thought I was master of the universe, I would often miss the mark. I was misjudging things, either letting people down or getting caught up in fruitless pursuits. Fickle, flaky, faltering, and whatever other F words I can think of. Bad habits. Self centered motives. Impulses. These things were (and some still are) the driving forces of my life. But what's bad and what's good?
Sometimes I follow a random thread or idea and it turns into something of value. Ideas might fail or fall short of your goal, but if you have many ideas to pursue you'll never be bored.
So where am I going with this? I've been ruminating on all the traveling I've done in the last six or so months, and I wanted to express my happiness with the notion of throwing yourself into the unknown. The idea is simple: get lost somewhere in the world, and see what happens. I didn't fully realize it at the outset, but the cliché is true: you've got to lose yourself to find something better. New and improved Human Being v2.0.
I've been building a mental list of my condensed travel highlights over the past few weeks, but they're just starting to pour out. Here are some darned good reasons to travel:
Experience more language barriers.
Surmounting language barriers in any given place is an incredible challenge. This will activate all sorts of dusty, tangled regions in your brain, but it's time for some Spring cleaning.
Meeting your basic needs hinges largely on the people you meet while traveling abroad. We rely greatly on people to help us find things in a new place. This requires getting comfortable with approaching strangers you can't verbally understand. The process can be exhausting, but also exhilarating when everything comes together. Some days might feel like everything is working against you, but part of the experience is learning how to accept those defeats and move on to new solutions.
With a little luck and persistence, those neurons will be firing like a turbocharged V8 Hemi with all the high-octane jargon you can throw into this metaphor. You'll develop a system for each place, researching the crucial bits ahead of time without over-saturating your brains. Basically you will be a boss at life after traveling abroad for a while. You will know how to take initiative, create simple plans, and carry them out expertly. Life will start to feel like a game. It's like unlocking the next island in GTA, and soon enough you'll know it like the back (and front) of your hand.
Make up your own mind about a place or a people.
The predominant views of any given place as portrayed by the media are wildly inaccurate. Even your own experience will not be so easy to generalize. Travel consists of many chance encounters: you will meet heaps of people, locals and foreigners alike, and these meetings will color your entire experience.
Back home, you might be able to go for days without any social interaction. (Talking to your cat doesn't count, as much as I might hope). When you're on the go from country to country, however, some days might consist of hundreds of small exchanges. Walking down a busy street in one place might make you lend itself to anonymity, a fly on the wall. Enter a different space and you might find yourself in a sort of confrontation of cultures. You might feel like you're on the spot to deliver some sort of accurate representation of what it means to be a part of your nation, or culture.
But traveling is a biased experience, and this is all the more reason to get out there and do it yourself. It becomes something personal, and you get to decide what it all means to you.
Or maybe you'll find that the jury is always out on such a thing. Your mind simplifies things, but you will meet people who challenge those notions, creating more subtle ideas about what makes a new culture so interesting. Peel back the layers.
Assert yourself.
Going hand in hand with learning about new cultures, don't forget to stand up for yourself. In some ways you're a guest in another country, but being a guest doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your values to fit in with others. People will often try to squeeze you into their stereotypes of what they see externally, but you can help them out by putting in your two cents. It's an exchange, after all. You learn something from them, and they do the same.
Sometimes the discourse can get heated, but I like to imagine that we are all just trying to share our stories and move past the trivial externalities. Nationality starts to matter less and less; you can find commonality with most people.
The ten percent.
This is a vague number, but I gravitate to childishly simplistic things. You will meet so many people in such a compressed amount of time, but you might find that most people aren't really your cup of tea. You might find yourself in social situations you're not entirely comfortable with. You might even go an entire week without having what ever it is you consider to be good conversation. People find stimulation from different things, and it was the case for me that only about ten percent of people I encountered were people I wanted to continue hanging out with. Many were simply on other trains of thought and passed me by. You've got to keep meeting people to find the gems, which brings me to number five.
Single serving friends.
It's one of the most elating things to meet a potential best friend while traveling, but also a bit heartbreaking when you realize that you're moving along divergent paths. You will likely never see this person again in your life. The best you can do is throw away inhibition and make the most of that time together. Throw down all your cards, and you might just get a hugely refreshing and life-affirming experience out of these fleeting moments. If you're lucky, you might be heading in the same direction for a time.
Discomfort.
This one is a bit of a hard sell, but if you can find the humor in being squashed into the back of a tiny truck, or go days without showering, or endure food poisoning, and so on, you'll emerge from the other side with a sense of accomplishment. Learning to accept and embrace these wacky situations will build your resilience. You'll start to notice how easy it is to get preoccupied with being comfortable at all times (as well as how expensive it is), and this will free up your mind to think about more important things.
Like what you're having for dinner.
Food.
Food. Seriously. You'll eat so many new and unusual things. You'll also find some familiar dishes done better for a fraction of the cost.
Minimize your belongings.
*Let It Go begins playing somewhere in the distance*
We don't need a lot to get by in this world. It may be difficult to trim down the stuff you've been accumulating over the years, but the weeks leading to any big trip allow you to really consider what's necessary and what's just going to be covered in dust. You'll make goodbyes to books and clothes, but they pale in comparison to the goodbyes you'll share with your friends. These are happysad moments, but you'll remember how nice it is to be so connected with people.
Make the world smaller.
It's really big, and you'll never see it all. But as you meet people from around the world, you'll find that you have friends spanning around the globe. Your sense of community no longer terminates at the end of the street, or the city line, or the ocean. You'll find yourself caring about the world's current events because you can associate a face with the place. You'll gather your stories as you go and the stories of those you met, people leading drastically different lives. Some things are mundane, but the profound moments are illuminating.
Don't miss out.
Home will be there, but your idea of home may change along the way. Your friends and family might move, or pass away, regardless of where you are the world. So go get lost now while you can. Make some stories and share them with your friends. You won't regret it.
That's it.
That's all I've got for now. I've been thinking for months about how I would even begin to condense my travel experience into digestible nuggets. I wanted to think about how these things might begin to translate into the life I build when I return home. I want to share how rewarding the whole experience is. But it occurs to me that this process is just that: a beginning. It's an ongoing thing, and it doesn't really end when you end up at home, where ever that might be. You just have to keep on pondering and see what sticks.
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