Travelling - Addiction or Awesomeness?

After a long time, I am visiting my blog. Well, a happy new year, amigos. Hope all of you have something or the other to graze through, considering mine usually boring, with drops of joy here and there.


Well, this is all about me. About the ultimate desire in me- to have traveled around every nook and corner of this world while I am living.
Sometimes I feel like I was born to travel. I don’t mind airports or railway platforms or taxis or auto-ricksaws and time changes. Feeling out of place and not understanding people is pretty normal for me. I can make do with minimal personal hygiene(well it's true, I don't care) and I will try about almost anything(a little pause) as long as it doesn’t kill me(and, maybe, it's non-veg). I can deal with getting lost in a city(that I feel). As much as it is the thrill of being in a new place, travel has brought a lot of unexpected richness in my life.



Travel has widened my sensory experience. Often when we go outside the confines of our everyday, we are given an opportunity to a new way of seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling and tasting. I've often joked that my "love language" is trying new things. I haven't loved everything that I've tried but I think I have a pretty open mind and willing spirit just to jump into "whatever" and hope for the best :) One of my favorite ways to experience a culture is to try the local food- even if it is something strange like dal-baati from Rajasthan or a Horse's meat in Belgium.

 
Travel  has stretched my ability to live simply. Going beyond the borders of what was comfortable for me forced me adapt to the unknown and the unpredictable. I learned that I didn’t need much in this life, and that richness is found in the way you do things and not what others think is right. Living over in Europe where the pace of life is completely different than India has shocked me- I love the convenience of so many things in here but I've learned I can also easily live in a place where life shuts down on Sunday and after 6pm. I've learned to be efficient in getting things done and really just letting things go that are not really necessary. I have learnt to clarify rather than complicate things. Cesare Pavese said once, “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” Exactly.



 
Travel has broadened my understanding of the world. It broadens my heart and soul to what I welcome as good and it puts me in touch with pain and suffering that I am often shielded from. It helps me see my prejudices and bigotry that I don’t realize I have. It also gives me a more holistic perspective of the culture I grew up in and the culture I am immersed in now. Samuel Johnson puts it well, “Traveling helps regulate our imaginations by reality, instead of thinking how things may be, we see them as they are.



 
Travel has deepened parts of me I wouldn't have otherwise tapped into. There’s something about travel that unmasks and unravels our inner being. I have traveled on my own, traveled with some great friends and traveled with strangers, who through the adventure end up becoming friends.  I've learned a lot about myself in all the types of travel I've done, learned a lot about my friends and bonded with complete strangers. 





 

Perhaps deep within we are all nomads and sojourners who have lost touch of what travel does to us because these days, we want nothing more than to stay put, be stable and lock in on the promise of security for ourselves and our families. But travel pulls away that veil and reminds us that THIS isn’t it. There are better things ahead. We don’t fully know or comprehend what is over there, but we only hope.


 
I feel very blessed with all the travel opportunities I've had. I just hope to have a thousand such opportunities again. Well, that was about my journey. What about yours?

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