What A Life Of Travel Does To You

It’s not everyday that you read something that sounds as if it came out of your very own mind. I was almost gasping as I reached the end of this article as it was a perfect exposition of how I feel towards travel and why there is a compulsion for me to go out and explore new lands at every chance I can. I always wondered if I was just being weird, or greedy, or restless – and maybe I am all three – but it’s still a little reassuring to know that I’m not the only one out there, that I’m not crazy for wanting to spend all the money I earn on seeking new adventures in foreign lands. It’s also not that I don’t love my home or the people here; in fact I’m well aware that had I not been born here, my experiences and opportunities would have been vastly different. But there’s just so much more, too much more, out there.

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

This quote by Miriam Adeney perhaps explains why there is this perpetual, insatiable emptiness in me – it comes from all that richness. It’s that feeling of having loved too much, given too much, of allowing yourself no inhibitions – such that when it’s time to leave (and that time inevitably comes), you’re left with nothing more, and nothing less, than a treasury of wonderful memories. And at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I must accept the fact that I might never be whole again. I’m reminded of the impermanence that I wrote about: the fact that it has to be like this. These are memories and moments that happened because I was there, and you were there, and we were all there at that fateful time, and they can never be created again or the same … but that’s fine because at least, I was privileged enough to share in this with you. That little bit of me I left with Daniel in Peru, with Alex & Sabine in Vienna, with the Cambodian kids in the village, with you in all the places we’ve visited … they’re like tiny Horcruxes that might or might not survive time, but that I’ve willingly sacrificed because losing them has made me so much richer.  As someone who is most certainly “condemned” to a life of travel, this broken-heartedness is the price that I must and will gladly pay- again, and again, and again.

Why;

I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time, and now I’ve finally begun. I always thought that it was a huge, huge pity that I didn’t document down my travels while studying abroad in Europe, and I’ve decided that for the sake of my own ailing memory,  I shall keep a detailed (and interesting!) log of all travels to come, plus tidbits about anything that is related to travelling with a purpose.

And here, an excerpt from an amazing article written by Pico Iyer that perfectly summarizes my traveling philosophy:

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in,

and fall in love once more.

Read the full article here. Really, please do. It’s so good.

I like being amazed, I like being surprised, I love being awed, and I’m not ashamed to admit that it doesn’t take much to awe me. But I guess I travel so as to constantly fill myself with a sense of wonderment, and to constantly remind myself that there is still too much in this world I don’t know about.