Travel: The Antidote to Ignorance

Travel is the great antidote to ignorance.

Once we step out of our habitual rhythms and leave everything we've known (even momentarily) it's hard to see the same world when we return.

And, while we all know people who carry their prejudices with them like a raincoat, (I'm reminded of a particularly dull Englishman who spent a three-hour minibus from Izmir to Fethiye loudly whinging to his wife about the "Turkish" drivers), most people surrender their certainties when they hit the road.

These are either willingly submitted, or the "truths" we've accumulated over time are dragged from us kicking and screaming until we realize that, as Marcus Aurelius astutely observed in Meditations, our "truths" were perspectives.

There's something refreshing and revitalizing about arriving at a place we've held beliefs about and sheepishly realizing we've constructed a false narrative.

We've concocted a dream based on desires, biases, and the dreamscape created by the distortions of other people's opinions.

Confronted with the reality of our misunderstandings, our certainty begins to unhinge, and it's a potent tonic.

We consider what else we've casually draped in superficial assumptions and ideals.

We begin to understand that all of life must be digested through the felt presence of direct experience, as Terrence McKenna espoused, not through the reductive socio-cultural valves we've been taught represent reality. The charades we have been encouraged to master.

And, if we permit further introspection, we often conclude that most of the things we took to be "us," our personality, socio-religious beliefs, and cognitive frameworks are the offspring of culture, not intuition.

That, had we been born in the Gaza Strip, the Rajasthani desert, or the foothills of Sapa, we would have most likely adopted the same belief systems the people we encounter have.

Herein lies the great healing power of travel: We succumb to the not-so-obvious truth that we are one undulating human story painted with many guises.

It's naturally a startling realization, and very often, a provoker of radical life changes.

After all, what is more powerful than the simultaneous reclamation of our energy, vitality, and connection to our intuition?

So, travel, if submitted to graciously, will cure us of many cultural distortions and bring us closer to our center.

Of course, there'll always be the people who maintain through comparison that everything they see abroad is inferior to "home."

Yet, ultimately, it's their loss: they'll never taste the joy of unfiltered connection to the kaleidoscopic manifestations of human life around us, nor the recognition of the eternal reality that hierarchies between these expressions are as absurd as creating hierarchies between planets.

Ultimately, this is the enduring healing balm of travel: the release and regeneration birthed from seeing the self in the Other.

Because when we believe we can learn a thing or two from our differences, we do.

These are the curiously synchronistic gifts gained from surrendering our deepest convictions and beliefs at the feet of the people we meet out there on the road.