IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
How naïve were you to think that travel will be your escape.
Maya Angelou said, “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
I wondered for a while on why I wanted to write about this, but in the end the thought seemed essential and I felt a need to put it out there. For as long as I can remember, a person who has travelled has been considered wise, worldly and filled with experiences that are so deeply their own and so personal — almost like every wrinkle and laugh line holds a story of a stranger in a strange city, a forgotten face with a memorable conversation, a broken language with a helpful gesture.
The world is going through a hard time. In the past year, we’ve seen so many attacks; we’ve seen people being forced out of their homes desperate for refuge; hate crimes; bans; and maybe too much in a year. This is the time when travel is more important than ever.
Why I say this is because I believe in what we were taught as kids: men who travel are men who are wise. Traveling is an experience that forces you to come in contact with people from different race, color, creed and religion. Sometimes they can be bad but sometimes you can sit with a person in a strange city all night and talk about your dreams and aspirations; sometimes you can feel understood in a way that you didn’t think was possible. After those sometimes, you’re going to come back with changed perspectives, immense respect and tolerance for people with beliefs and ideas that are different that your own. This time, you would come home but everything will be changed. All of us, you will realize, look for better lives and better futures for ourselves and despite our differences, we’re all essentially the same.
With the negativity that surrounds us, we must find positivity and hope. Traveling lets you do just that!
What do you do when you lose a wallet in a city that barely speaks a word of English? What do you do when a woman in that city helps you with money so that you can reach home safely? You let go of your fear and find a new ray of positivity; a warm fuzzy feeling of hope engulfs you. This fuzzy feeling will come back every time you will think of that experience. This is what traveling is. It will give you the freedom to find your own hope and your own idea of positivity. Whether it’s a woman who helped you or a man that patiently explained the confusing map or a coffee shop owner who gave you extra coffee on a particularly cold night, you will find that hope is to be never given up. Travel so that we come together to love each other in these microscopic movements, to forget what divides us on the macro level. In the world’s most ‘dangerous’ places are people with the biggest hearts.
Only when you travel enough will you realize that reality is so far from what we were fed continuously through various sources. Only then will you love this world a little more for the beauty it holds within. Travel so that you understand this. Travel so that you see the world isn’t such a bad place after all. Travel to the next country or for that matter even the next state and you’ll understand what I mean when I urge you to go out and most importantly get out!
Travel so that we unite and come together to fight bigotry, injustice and to believe that we’re more powerful as a unit - to believe that we’re all still fundamentally human and all the same. Travel so that the good in people prevails over the evil because we need to see the beauty in this world all over again and show it to the ones who cannot. If we stop traveling, we will stop connecting and we will accept that borders make us different and those differences are real.
So, we were naïve to believe that travel is going to be an escape. Travel is a means to grow and nurture not only yourself but everyone that you come in contact with, and that my friend is why we must travel now more than ever.
