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Initially, I treated traveling as the end goal of a glorious and successful career, a successful love life, and the progression of social status. Yes, I would love those romantic weekends away with my partner, or taking ten days out to backpack around SE Asia, only to come home and regale the stories; the sights, smells, sounds. People lived vicariously through these stories and I enjoyed that they enjoyed them. I gained something from their enjoyment of it. I set up an Instagram and I started to post photos of the tropical places that I’d end up in and I gained followers searching for that little bit of paradise.
Traveling taught me to see other perspectives.
The more I took these ten-day trips the more dissatisfied and disillusioned I became, because I really wanted to take in the environment, I really wanted to live the experience, and I became disillusioned by the sense that people were following because of the places that I went and not the feelings and experiences I had when I went there. I became disillusioned with the fact that with that perspective and how I approached the traveling, I wasn’t gaining the experiences of the culture that I wanted to experience. I wasn’t finding the local experiences.
This seemed to be part and parcel of my spiritual growth — I get exasperated by having to explain why I use that word, being defensive about it and saying it’s not because I’m religious it’s because I have a spirit. In truth, I have visited so many religious leaning places with beautiful, loving, and warm people whose religion ties them to loving-kindness actions that I don’t mind religion either in that context. Religion is just how you structure your beliefs and spirituality, each to their own, as long as it’s not harmful to self or others.
One of the main things that traveling provided me with was the knowledge that other cultures draw upon different wisdom; I started to get the sense that their cultural mindsets were different. I really found this out when I lived in China for a summer, and when I took a year to backpack around Asia. Teaching English in China was a real crash course for a twenty-four-year-old white British male with ideas of white privilege that had been drilled into me by my culture. It was a turning point, and I made a lot of mistakes out there. I failed to grasp their culture, their mindset, their needs at times. At other times, I was open and I soaked in all of the beautiful, and in my opinion alternative, a wisdom that they had to offer. I learn fast and I’ve always been that way, I soak up the wisdom that I consider congruent to what I need and the first chance I get I’ll try and practise that. The biggest thing that I started to learn out there is the philosophical concept of harmony; a more collective responsibility, a respect for elders, a respect for generational wisdom. That exists in British culture, if it didn’t then I wouldn’t have been able to recognise it, but in China, it is more paramount.
I started to integrate these concepts into my life, I started to find more balance between the pragmatism of my upbringing and the harmony of the east. I practise balance as a way of life now, I am always considering and balancing the necessary practical steps and how it makes me feel: how I affect my environment, and how my environment affects me.
Perspective is a wonderful thing, it can be super hard and challenging to the beliefs that I hold and it can take me a while to integrate those perspectives however I will always trade holding my belief statically for the possibility of another perspective and how it may change my beliefs and therefore my process of life. There may something within those perspectives that helps me to live an easier and happier life, and at the very worst it helps me to understand myself better.
Traveling taught me to be curious, and to be self-reflective.
The wonders of a different culture lie in the everyday hustle and bustle of a street. Colours, patterns and designs, the music that swells in the market place, or wafts in on the wind through an open doorway, the smell of new and strange spices, the design of clothes, the religious rituals, the singing, the food — how it’s prepared, how it’s shared, how it’s eaten, the landscapes and how that affects the people’s opinions of things.
There really is an endless list of curiosities in these environments, and existing in that state of wonder and curiosity is so good for the human being. My soul craved that, I would wait for the next opportunity to go out into the world and spend my hard-earned cash on that state of being, I would count down the days until I could go to the next new and exciting country. I holidayed in strange and small countries as well as the old tourist favourites.
Once I started to become aware of an element of dissatisfaction creep into these states and experiences I started to realise a curious thing, the local people would be one of two things amongst my state of awe and curiosity:
- Proud to share their culture and their identity with me.
- A little bemused at my curiosity.
I love to share my culture and my identity with others, I reveled in that more in the past but I still enjoy it, that’s the essence of true connection and we all crave connection but the bemusement of those people stuck with me, it lingered in my mind and returned to me whenever I had doubts about something or I was depressed that I couldn’t experience those things anymore.
The penny started to drop; I started to realise that these people don’t find their culture curious, it’s normal for them. I started to wonder what was normal to me. What do I get bemused about when people were curious about it?
That was the start of a very long journey of self-discovery.
When I think about those people that looked at me in a bemused way I feel the initial discontent that I felt, I felt that they were trying to ruin my day, or they were rude and unkind, or unfriendly. Their lessons to me were of a larger and longer scope. They were teaching me that there are some things that all of us take for granted, and only cultivated self-reflection can bring us to an awareness of those things so that we can consciously choose what are life is like.
Mr Quyen, 2015, Hagiang Province, Vietnam — picture taken by me.
Traveling taught me that each person is unique.
Yes, there are collective mindsets and cultural constructs but each person has their own unique take on that, they might integrate that knowledge into a different way of living, they may draw upon a different concept of life. I’ve met so many people and listened to their beliefs and why they believe them. Each one has a unique take on the wisdom of life.
Traveling taught me that art is essential.
Art is everywhere you go. It’s humanity’s way of making sense of the world. It exists in a long line, unbroken, from our ancestors who painted on rock walls to the carvers of ancient stone buildings, to the poets, artists, musicians, and dancers of today. You can learn the most about a culture through their art.
Traveling taught me that life is hard.
The number one impact of traveling for me is to understand that life is hard! It’s a challenge. There are many reasons why it is unfair, how nature can take as well as give, how governments can be self-serving and not be concerned with certain aspects of a population, how people are left to fend for themselves.
The most shocking, and life-changing, example of this for me was when I visited India in 2015. I could not believe the scale of the poverty I saw there and the practicality of it; how it was accepted as fact, as nature. There were scenes of squalidity in amongst scenes of opulence. There were rich spices at the market in one breath and in the very next an overwhelming smell of faeces. That’s the magic of India, everything exists all at once.
The magic being that it is not hidden, it is evident and you cannot ignore it like we ignore poverty in the west. You cannot walk passed it and choose not to register it, it exists on a level that demands your attention, and then you have to choose what your action will be, what take you have on the situation.
I’ve seen people living in poverty that have better mindsets than most affluent westerners I know, don’t get me wrong, their life is much harder than ours and their life expectancy is much lower; they face a daily struggle to find food and water, and a safe shelter at night yet what I experienced in India is that almost all of those people had time to smile at me as they walked passed. They smiled first. That taught me something.
There are so many people in India that don’t smile, in fact, there’s plenty who scorn at your mere presence, but in the vast crowds and chaos of India the person that smiles radiates through the crowd.
I remember being at a remote train station on the way somewhere in India, my partner and I had stopped for a connecting train but the train wasn’t running. We left the station and sat outside with a multitude of people that were also waiting for information. I find these scenarios the hardest when I’m traveling because of the language, I find it hard to trust that I will be able to know the correct information at the correct time. When there’s only a single train number to look out for amongst the unfamiliar sights and sounds of another language. Invariably I have found that asking someone to help translate is the way to know for sure, and I found that hard as well. Something of the shame trigger of weakness coming into play there.
This particular scenario would change my life because on that day I was moody, I was hot and bothered and I was short with my partner, who was trying to help us both, and I didn’t want to interact with anyone outside of myself — which is impossible in India so I was getting irate. I was feeling frantic, I was searching the crowd for clues of the next step when I saw this man sitting on the wall of a raised, planted, garden. He was beaming, he radiated love and kindness with a huge smile. I felt his energy exuding from him towards me. I felt like I’d been missing out on something, I felt that the way I had been living was wrong and because I didn’t feel worthy, and I wasn’t in a good mood, I looked away, but I was curious so a couple of seconds later I looked back and he was still there and still beaming out love.
He walked over to us and started talking to my partner, she was interested and I was rude and off with him, I don’t even remember whether I acknowledged him at all, and I turned my back to him. I remember him saying to my partner, “There can’t be love without trust.” She was affected by that, and so was I. Especially as I’d turned my back to his wisdom. We aren’t together anymore but the takeaway I took from that moment is that trust can exist in an instant moment between complete strangers, trust can exist amongst all of the hardships of life. It’s trust, and the courage to return to the failures in order to learn, that breeds love; that allows love to exist.
Traveling taught me that awareness of expectation is everything.
Traveling is idolised a lot. That’s the hard fact of it. There’s a portrayal of traveling as glamour and luxury. Yes, those things exist for the top 1% of our society but they don’t exist for most of us. Most of us will likely end up on a package holiday or find ourselves at a beach resort. If you’re traveling in Asia, the staff at this beach resort have most likely taken the opportunity to enter the tourist trade because that’s the best opportunity that they have to make a good living, or because they’re really kind people who have a lot to give.
So many times I’ve witnessed westerners on their holidays acting like royalty; demanding too much from the staff, demanding luxury treatment that’s not available, and generally treating the people around them like they’re beneath them. If things don’t go their way, they get aggressive and they get threatening.
I won’t lie, I have behaved like this before in extremely challenging circumstances, where I’ve lost my temper and become aggressive towards someone, it is part of human behaviour and we are all capable of it, however, it’s undesirable and the expectation belies the ability to behave like this consistently and defining a sense of normal balance is really important in this aspect. If you believe it’s acceptable to treat people like that in any given situation then you’re expectations are skewed.
I very quickly learned and adjusted my entitled and prejudiced behaviour, I met so many people were resentful of how tourists treated them on a regular basis, I took in their pain to try to understand it. It comes from a systematic privilege and the white fragility that is so talked about at the moment. I now talk to whoever I come across as a human being that’s standing in front of me. I don’t judge or assume, I make my assessment of them based on what they say, how they act, and their body language. This is not to say that I haven’t deemed someone toxic to me and my environment, I’ve distanced myself and set boundaries with plenty of people out in tourist areas who are looking for quick cash and to take advantage of the situation. Their desperation is not to be judged. Who knows what situation they are in or what the conditions of their childhood were, I usually give them some money and politely decline any more interaction with them.
Out there on the road, there are so many people who will teach you the meaning of what love, equanimity, non-judgment, kindness, compassion, or care is. I wasn’t finding those people when I went in with judgments and expectations, quite rightly, they were the ones that politely declined any more interaction with me.
The biggest takeaway from this is that once my expectations dropped with traveling I was free to experience reality as it was at that moment, and decide for myself how I thought about it.
Francis & Josephine, Kerala, India, — They taught me so much. Picture taken by me.
Traveling taught me that the world dynamics change.
I don’t want to generalise so I won’t, a lot of Asia has changed drastically in the last five years and there’s always been an aspect of every country that is self-sustaining and affluent. When I was traveling in Asia even ten years ago it was vastly different to now. China, for example, I visited China in 2010, then again in 2015 and it was a shock to me how much it had changed. I had romanticised the slower ways of life, the street vendors selling their food, and the people taking time to relax in the midday sun. Those street vendors were discouraged because of health standards. I’m sure that these things still exist somewhere however a lot more of the populations in China, and other Asian countries, have more opportunities now. Technology is changing things, more people have access to health care, to knowledge and wisdom, and to ways of making money so they can provide security. I’ve met so many people with different ways of life, and different political and religious beliefs.
This, along with a lifelong fascination for history, started my curiosity about human systems; sociology, economics, politics, how does a culture sustain itself and how does that culture operate with other cultures. That started an interest in geopolitics and how the world is interconnected. When I first went to Hong Kong, I wanted to visit the Hong Kong museum. I was absolutely shocked to find a significant part of it about the hardships of life under British colonial rule, and resentments that the local population built. I’m not saying that there weren’t good things, but inevitably there were bad aspects as colonial rule was maintained by shame and aggression.
That started me on the journey of how history has been, how cultures have dominated others, and how people find a way to be submissive against a ruling elite. Ultimately this journey led me to the understanding that those aspects of myself lie within myself as well. There are aspects of myself that dominate other aspects of myself.
Traveling taught me that holidays are different from traveling.
We all love holidays because they are one of the only times that our culture celebrates taking time for ourselves, and encourages relaxing; doing nothing, recharging, eating well, laughing, enjoying nature, reading a book. All of these things are focused on our own personal well-being.
Culture is changing pretty rapidly around this and all of these habits are seeping into the everyday landscape, and that is exactly what I learned from traveling, that these things can be a part of the everyday balance of life. They should be.
When I backpacked all around Asia for a year, I had to learn to integrate some of these things into my everyday life because the environments I was in were always strange to me, I couldn’t soothe or distract myself with my outside environment, so I had to find small pieces of well-being in my daily inner routine. Once I was that way inclined I was in a great position to get curious and to learn from the thousands of years of these practises in Asia. Throughout the years I have cultivated this into meditation and mindfulness practise which brings me great joy and enables me to feel a vast amount of love.
Iceland — Picture taken by me.
Traveling taught me the awe and scale of nature.
I’ve always loved hiking and it’s through my passion for walking amongst nature that I’ve seen some of the world’s most incredible and awe-inspiring wonders. I hope to see more too.
These landscapes and vistas and the personal challenge of hiking amongst them have provided me with so many reflections and brought me so much wisdom to integrate.
I am a part of nature, I recognise it’s scope, I recognise my small place on a grander scale, and I recognise how it shows up within me as well as without.
Mount Fuji, Japan 2015 — picture taken by me.
Takeaways.
Whatever the need you have for traveling it is your own experience and that is valid. I believe that we all are on a path to self-awareness and that each experience we have can be knowledge to integrate into wisdom to get us there.
There’s been so much that I have gained from getting out there and seeing other cultures and how they live, and so much more to come. How some people are happy amongst hardship, some people are happy amongst mediocrity, some people are happy amongst opulence, and also there are cases of people that aren’t happy amongst all of those scenarios. It taught me that self-reflection and curiosity, and an endless seeking to learn from challenges, failures, successes, and joys is my promise to myself and allows me to make sense of how I feel amongst all those things, what I agree with, and how I like to express that.
It’s taught me the power of humility, and the power of anger as a force for good which gives me the energy to change the things that I feel are violating my sense of being. Whether that’s within me, or setting healthy and respectful boundaries in my environment.
Traveling is life, it’s just a different life to the one I have known. There are always things that can connect us, and things to understand the differences.
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Previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Peter Middleton