The Gift of Travel
Travel is certainly a privilege.
Anyone who espouses the opposite is deluded by their own and not worth listening to.
Travel is the privilege of a lifetime, and when experienced deeply, it enhances compassion, patience, curiosity, and empathy for your fellow human beings: the greatest tonic for a sickeningly imbalanced world.
Travel humbles. It is a sharing, an exposure to societal realities. The uncomfortable truth that, despite what the media vomits daily, most people out there are kind, generous, decent, and simply trying to do their best for themselves and their children under very difficult circumstances, an insight that cannot help but fill you with deep and enduring gratitude for all you've been granted in this ovarian lottery.
Real travel forces you to reflect on and digest the uncomfortable.
Not everyone requires (or can experience) such a radical mode of living for various unfortunate and rational reasons. These circumstances cannot be waved away with regurgitated new-age catchphrases and weekend Costa Rican mantra workshops.
To expect this to be a serious and empathetic solution to the world's sorrows is arrogance and ignorance, the product of unchecked economic abundance and a Western society that sees only what they want to see through the buffers of their privilege.
Therefore, if you're lucky enough to travel extensively, it delivers you to the disquieting reality that you probably have been the benefactor of far more than you understand or appreciate. That alone makes you unnervingly lucky in a sea of people who would give anything to have even a slither of the freedom you enjoy.
It forces the realization that no matter how sincerely you try to merge with a culture or a people and dissolve buffers, you are forever a voyeur. An onlooker drifting through the lattice of human experience. And, if digested properly, this realization encourages curiosity. An obligation to see the world free from the fractured lenses of prejudice and stale dogmas.
Travel facilitates humility. An acceptance that perhaps you have no idea about even a photon of life out there. That the books you devoured growing up cannot possibly substitute the living, undulating monumental reality of life. That religion cannot be dismissed and debased as the backward plaything of archaic, regressive cultures, but the mysterious thread that binds us with the cave painters of Chauvax or the builders of Gobekli Tepe.
Ultimately, if you insist on meeting the world deeply, openly, and away from the obnoxiousness of the tourist beat, then you are entering into a different territory entirely.
It's an obligation to see this world and perhaps even an obligation to share your discoveries. To eat with the locals, as Bourdain relentlessly pedaled, to share their festivities and their cultural peculiarities without bias is not just an unfathomable privilege; it's a gift and one that should be treated with gratitude, curiosity, and sincerity. The understanding that true travel is a way of life, a cognizance of the world around you, completely departed from the notion of a holiday.
Travel is not always easy, and it certainly is not relaxing. But the reward of truly sharing the little moments with human beings around the world and realizing that we are all aching and yearning for the same basic tenets is, to me at least, far more gratifying than a mortgage, a nice title, and the stability of a 9-5 in the city.
If anything, life on the road introduces you to countless incredible, compassionate, wise, and truly inspiring people, many of whom have been burdened by circumstances well beyond anything any sane person would deem reasonable. However, despite this, I have been continuously humbled by the dignity, strength, and patience of the majority of the people I've encountered.
Everywhere I have traveled, in all corners of society, I've found solace in the kindness and generosity of strangers, the compassion between people, the similarity in our collective experiences of the truly important things in life (love, loss, friendship, grief, death, joy, music, art) and, despite what every news bulletin wants us to believe, the reality that in my experience most of us are simply trying to do the best we can with the less than perfect experiences we have been granted.
If you're privileged enough to travel, you're doing yourself an immeasurable disservice if you don't get out there and challenge your assumptions and truths before you regurgitate them to another generation.
