How Can Travel Change Your Life?
Can travel change your life for the better? While it might not be for everyone, travel can be enticing for many. The thought of embarking on a new expedition to some distant land in hopes of adventure is quite romantic. Experiencing life in another hemisphere can be enough to pique your imagination and make you throw caution to the wind.
But travel does come with its fair share of logistical concerns that may not be for everyone. Jumping timezones, enduring airport security checks, exchanging currencies, trying to fumble around with the local language, and learning the cultural customs are a few of the many inconveniences you will inevitably come across.
Some people might opt for the alternative all-inclusive vacation package. This is appealing since most resorts take care of all the heavy lifting for you. In this case, you are free to unplug and gorge yourself into a stupor of unlimited food and top-shelf spirits.
I, myself, enjoy these indulgent resorts from time to time. However, the transformative effects of travel are severely undermined when you take this route. If you want to change your life, you’re going to have to venture off the beaten path every once in a while.
If you could just substitute most of the luxuries you will experience overseas with the ones you can entertain yourself with at home, why would you go through the trouble in the first place? The benefits of travel can far outweigh the sedentary life you may live back at home. Travel changes you, but you have to start being intentional. Otherwise, you’re selling yourself short on the whole experience.
After all, trips require a lot of pre-planning and cost upfront before you can even consider locking in your flight.
So what exactly is the point of travel? What makes it so alluring and keeps us coming back for more? What are the benefits of travel? How exactly does it change your life?
1. Travel Will Open Your Mind
The outer journey, as mentioned above, is quite obvious. While embarking on a new expedition across continents, you will invariably come across beautiful monuments.
You will make lifelong friends, and be exposed to different lifestyles that you never even considered possible. The food you eat will most likely be a lot healthier than many Western dishes. And living conditions may shock you as to just how little people need to be happy.
But what makes travel so addicting is the spiritual effect it leaves you with. This is what I like to refer to as your inner journey. Continuous exposure to different cultures will have a profound effect on your worldviews.
One of the many benefits of travel is that you will be forced to leave your comfort zone. The result is a gradual erosion of the lifelong perspectives and assumptions you have built up at home.
The narrow-minded patterns you adopted while growing up will slowly begin to burgeon. Your mind will open up to a myriad of lifestyles that may be worth exploring. These new ways of thinking can radically change your life.
Some of these alternative ways of living you will happily embrace. While others may have you questioning why you ever left home in the first place.
Ever since the dawn of existence, human beings have been making pilgrimages for a plethora of reasons. Whether you make this journey for religious practices to prove devotion to some divine entity.
Or perhaps it is for a personal undertaking as a rite of passage to discover some truth. Every civilization, at one time or another, has observed these spiritual quests.
Through these quests, we begin to evolve as individuals. Travel changes you from the inside out. You will start to transcend your previous state of being and grow into a new and improved version of yourself.
2. Learn to Let Go of Control
Travel helps you to learn to let go of control. When you’re lost in a foreign country and you don’t speak the local language, you have no choice but to accept how everything will play out.
In the beginning, it will feel like pulling teeth, but the more you encounter this, the easier it will get.
While things won’t always go according to plan, you shouldn’t let this impact the journey negatively. Itineraries will change, transportation arrangements will get canceled, and unforeseen mishaps are bound to happen.
Learn to recognize misfortune and approach it with an open and optimistic mindset. In this case, patience becomes a downright necessity and not just some abstract virtue that we learn to cultivate.
Rather than feel powerless, learn to constructively deal with what is happening. Focus your efforts on variables that you can control: your approach to the situation, how you respond to it, and your ability to creatively problem-solve your way out of these less-than-ideal circumstances.
Accepting that it is impossible to control everything that happens to you is a sign of tremendous growth in maturity. Travel changes you in this way without you even realizing it.
Only in retrospect will you be able to observe the positive changes that these moments can yield. You will learn how to be resourceful with what you have all while practicing humility.
Always remember that some of the best memories can happen from the least expected encounters. It may not be the best of experiences while it is happening.
But it always makes for an interesting story later on.
3. Travel Offers You a Blank Slate
Another mental block that travel can help strip away is the expectation of what society believes you “should” be. Growing up in one place and developing a rock-solid community of people can be very beneficial for many reasons.
But it can also mold you into a version of yourself that doesn’t feel like a perfect fit for you.
Peer pressure and societal expectations can wreak havoc on your spirit and influence your trajectory of life dramatically. As a result, many individuals can experience nihilism, depression, and existential crises.
Sure it’d be nice to have that fancy new car or that corner office that comes with the executive promotion, but are those things really going to make you happy? Or are they just milestones you’re collecting to try and impress the people around you?
When you travel, you can shed all expectation to be this certain someone everyone thinks you should be. The beauty of life on the road is that no one knows who you are. This blank slate allows you to change your life at the drop of a hat.
People on the road don’t care who it is you are or what your family thinks you should be. Everything on the road is transient. This means that people come and go all the time.
Nobody has the luxury to sit around and deliberate how you should properly live your life following society’s expectations.
Travel allows you to leave your story and past life behind. You can start anew and discover yourself all over again.
Quite frankly, no one even cares how you live your life as much as you do. So why would you let society determine that for you?
When traveling, people will usually focus their time and energy on the here and now. This is because you probably aren’t going to see most of these individuals again. People will only know the current you in the present moment.
They won’t even think twice as to how your future will play out or the baggage that you carry around. Your past remains anonymous and your future and where you are going in life is irrelevant.
This idea should be liberating because it allows you to explore new facets of yourself. You can finally experiment with things you’ve always wanted to try but perhaps were too scared to at home. Traveling changes you in this way.
You can act completely uninhibited without worrying about the judgment you may receive from others. Make a fool of yourself and see what gives you fulfillment.
People might be watching, but who cares? You’re probably never going to see them again anyway.
Indulge in all of the nuances this life has to offer. Pick up the pieces of the things that give your life a little more light than before. Integrate these new dimensions of yourself into your everyday life.
And practice these newfound behaviors you have learned along the way. You are free to choose who it is you want to be. The privilege of deciding your lifestyle is yours and yours alone.
4. Time Will Begin to Expand
Vagabonding isn’t only about allotting a portion of your life to travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. As you grow into your new self on the road, time will also begin to change meaning.
Back at home, routines and deadlines fill our days so we can be productive members of society. “Time is money” drives most of our thought processes in the Western world to maximize results for whatever task is at hand.
This can be a good thing when we want to be efficient, but not so good when we are trying to grow as individuals.
Travel, however, demonstrates that time is merely a construct to make sense of the days. And its importance to us is relative. Instead of living for the weekend, as most nine-to-fivers can attest to, you change your life to accommodate the lifestyle you have chosen to embrace on the road.
Every day will feel like a weekend excursion for you. Monday will not seem so depressing and Friday will slowly lose the frivolous charm of overindulgence for the weekend.
Deadlines and time-sensitive matters may still hold some weight over you if you are to make your flight or that African safari expedition. But you will soon discover that your life is no longer solely dictated by these time constraints.
Freeing up this notion of time, you will realize that one of the main reasons time seems to elapse so much faster the older you get is that you essentially begin to put your life on autopilot and follow through with the appropriate motions.
As a child, you’re awake every second and dissecting all of the new information the world is sending your way.
But as an adult, we learn to become efficient and compartmentalize all of the redundancy. Correspondingly, your days become blurred as time passes by, and you will only be able to recall the novel experiences from your memories.
Traveling helps to reawaken this inner wonder, and you will learn to recognize that time is fluid and not stagnant.
Branching out of your typical daily patterns in exchange for something novel and exciting every day will fill your memory bank with riches that no corporate 401K plan could ever hope to match.
5. Travel Will Give You Courage
Another positive trait that will surface from your travels is that you will learn to replace fear with courage. It’s no surprise that travel can bring about some highly uncomfortable scenarios. And oftentimes, you will have no choice but to work through the discomfort.
Fears can range from the more primal, instinctive nature of evading physical harm to the more emotional side of avoiding the mental trauma that may arise out of looking silly in some arbitrary situation.
As hard as it is to confront fear, you must replace this pretension of fear with the awareness that things may not always be as bad as they seem. Our fears, though seemingly very “real” are by definition mental. That is, they exist entirely in our heads.
Recognizing this fact better prepares you for taking the leap and surmounting your irrational fears. You will eventually realize fear may have been holding you back from experiences you would have otherwise missed out on.
Working on fear is like working on a muscle. It needs to be gradually trained and over time, it will become second nature.
You gain confidence through small, daily incremental steps rather than one massive, high-intimidating action. Start with small fears such as saying hello to strangers, and slowly make your way up the ladder to big fears like skydiving.
With each new fear you conquer, you will gain confidence, and you’ll be better positioned to tackle life’s most difficult challenges that lie ahead.
6. Stereotypes and Prejudices Will Fade
Stereotypes and prejudices have a nasty way of bringing out the worst in us.
Whether it’s because of your line of work, the media, or just an old-age assumption passed down through the generations of your family annals, presuming you know everything about a certain culture or specific type of people based on a small frame of reference locks up your mind to the wonderful reality and beauty that humanity can offer you.
This not only causes you to miss out on once-in-a-lifetime opportunities while traveling, but it also prevents you from making some deep connections with people you wouldn’t otherwise normally associate with.
The real world clutters our minds with prejudices and stereotypes if we let it. It will keep you from enjoying the rich relationships that a variety of people can bring.
Traveling changes you in this respect. On the road, you don’t have the adult world to get in the way of friendship. You just have playtime. And, like kids at playtime, you find the childlike sense of friendship that knows only joy, not judgment.
By embracing diverse cultures firsthand, you can break free from the shackles of preconceived notions and open yourself to experiences that won’t only change your life but will change others as well.
Traveling to these new lands and places creates exposure which in turn breeds empathy. You will invariably learn much more truth than the mainstream media could ever impart through your news outlets.
Because the media is always competing for your attention, the truth may not always be what it seems.
As a result, malpractice in the industry tends to paint a somewhat skewed sense of reality. Have you ever heard of the saying “if it bleeds, it leads”? Well, this saying couldn’t be more true when it comes to major headlines.
Humanity is absolutely fascinated with the abnormalities within our many societies. It’s hard for us to fathom how such twisted people and terrible tragedies can operate in our modern-day era.
As a result, we are drawn to it and intrigued by these irregularities. We long to learn more about it, and this is exactly how the media captivates us with malicious headlines. Consequently, these headlines end up jeopardizing some of the most beautiful places in the world.
They lure us in with the clickbait and sink their clutches in us with more of these oddities that eventually appear to be spreading across the globe. After continuous exposure to stories and news articles like this, the mind gets warped.
Consequently, our sense of reality gets bludgeoned with these false stories that we begin to accept as the norm outside of our usual routines. We become reclusive, afraid to interact with those outside of our usual circle of friends. And the world slowly morphs into this ominous place we have no interest in excavating.
Taking the leap and praying chance to travel proves to us that the world isn’t always a scary place. Sure, atrocity and catastrophe can happen, but it is the exception rather than the norm.
Statistically speaking, misfortune is no more likely to come across you in your travels than it would in your own backyard. The key here is to practice awareness of your immediate surroundings and maintain an appropriate dose of vigilance.
Don’t let paranoia spoil the chance for serendipity or ruin your outlook on the world at large.
Exposure to these new places directly will leave you with a fresh and more optimistic worldview.
It’s easy to imagine how countries and people “are” by absorbing the news or other media sources. It’s another thing to actually see and experience the reality firsthand, on the ground.
Traveling allows you to break free from these distorted narratives. In turn, you will foster a more positive and open-minded perspective.
Some places that are typically depicted as dangerous and “avoid at all costs” will harbor some of the kindest people you could ever hope to come across on your journey.
On the other hand, some of the developing, third-world countries that you assume are stuck in the pre-technological era, will turn out to be more advanced than you ever imagined possible.
Judging those who you don’t know is a defensive mechanism born out of fear of the unknown. Eventually, this acts as a resistance to prevent you from experiencing new things or unfamiliar scenarios.
This is a subconscious fear. Adopt the mindset that everything has a form of intrinsic value. It’s up to you to find and assess that specific value against your own personal values.
If travel is the death of prejudice, then pilgrimage is the birth of open-mindedness. This rekindles the reawakening of what the ancient Greeks called xenophilia.
This roughly translates to a love for strangers, an appreciation of foreign cultures, and a passion for understanding what is other. Never assume you know about a place until you’ve gone out and experienced the truth for yourself.
7. There is No One-Size-Fits-All Lifestyle
Finally, traveling will change your life by uncovering the truth that there is no “right” way to live your life.
Just because back at home holding a steady paycheck, putting up a white picket fence, getting married, having children, and many other arbitrary qualities are held in high regard, does not mean you have to adopt that narrative at any one point in your life.
The world will slowly reveal to you that there are many different paths to a life well-lived. And some of the rungs of achievement you believed were important will suddenly seem so absurd and leave you scratching your head as to why you even accepted that notion in the first place.
Life has a way of finding you in the furthest outreaches of the globe. You will discover there are many ways to live your life and that there is nothing wrong with going against the grain.
Finding bliss and uncovering your true happiness on the road is one of the many benefits it will grant you.
Try new foods, make new friends, take up a new hobby, immerse yourself in the local cultures, and discover what fits your idea of a perfect lifestyle.
It doesn’t have to be what your family and friends insist is best for you. It doesn’t even have to be what your community at home assures is most secure.
If it is a lifestyle that you can happily get behind and truly be your authentic self, then by all means, dive right in. Living abroad will expose you to a different approach to life – one in which you’re not expected to settle in one place and do one kind of job.
Perhaps some of us are meant to move around every few years, change jobs, and live many different micro-lives.
