The benefits of travel in your life experiences

By admin · Friday, July 31st, 2009

Travel is one of those things that everyone says they want to do, though it frequently plays second fiddle to more nugatory preoccupations-like work, or social groups. It’s kind of like being more eco-friendly, really: few people would dismiss the idea with any haste at all, yet equally few manage to put one foot in front of the other.

Traveling is the sum-total of putting one’s foot in front of the other tens of thousands of times. But locomotion itself gets you nowhere-well, yes, it does in fact take you places, but it doesn’t guarantee any return on investment. The kinetic necessarily yields, on occasion, to the aesthetic and the cerebral. In tandem, distance and dialog can make for some serious soulside development.

I always laugh at myself because I feel like to keep myself sane, I have to find myself in situations that the ordinary play-the-life-game drone would find utterly crazy. And there seems to be an inverse relationship between how near I am to daily life and how far I can look within myself; to make any inward progress at all, I must blast outward as much as I can. In this way, travel is rife with irony.

I did my undergraduate study abroad in Japan. I complained quite a lot because I was so broke that I was often subsisting of steamed rice and sencha, and I was jealous of the other students who received some heinously nice stipends only because they had enrolled from a sister university. Now, however, I would give anything to relive it. I powered up my handle on language, life, love and loss in a way I can’t imagine possible otherwise.

I recently sold some of the prime items of my classic video game collection (precisely two items – anyone know what a PC-Engine LT is?) to spend only three days in Reykjavk, Iceland. What that city did to me I’m not yet so sure I can flesh out with any confidence. I do know it was so profound that I am leaving both a full-time and a part-time job to live in Reykjavk for one month, this July. The pecuniary toll it will take is frightening. The exposure to art, music, literature, language, and Brennivn, though, will not only satiate my philomath’s urges but will prove directly applicable to my professional life.

Travel fashions an underexposed being into a learned citizen. Nothing, I think, would foster more peace than a proliferation of trilingualism. Nothing, I think, can turn an ignorant homebody into a cosmopolitan citizen like being lost and starving and exhausted-and elated!-in a strange land on a common planet. Perhaps a few stiff drinks don’t hurt, either. (Be careful with Chartreuse!)

Many an ailment have been cured by travel. I will never groan at airport lines-or perhaps any line-ever again. I will never become frustrated with a person who’s desperately trying to speak English to me-or any other language, for that matter. I will never fearfully ask a waitress what is or isn’t in a certain dish-instead, I will order the first thing on the menu that I don’t recognize. I will never promote war after having met people who forgive me unconditionally for coming from one of the world’s most violent and problematic countries. I will never walk unprepared into daily life.

With the world behind you, it is hard to lack confidence. Whether tangible (items on a resume) or metaphysical (soul-searching under the aegis of nocturne), my travels will never be idle memories. They form the grand context of things in which I continue place one foot in front of the other, with temerity and a flippant smirk.

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