Live like a traveler

About 1 hour after the midnight countdown of the New Year, I was walking down an unknown London street with a group of travelers, when someone asked me that question: “What’s your new year resolution? ”

Standing in the middle of this beautiful yet strange city I just started to know 2 days ago, something came to my mind:

“I want live like a traveler. ”

It’s more metaphorical than literal. I don’t have the luxury of time to travel everyday in the new year, but I want to live like that. Remember the feeling of arriving on a completely foreign place? We cluelessly hold the map and try to piece together how things work in this new land. Curiously we explore every bit of the city. Every corner we turn is an unknown world. Every bite of food we try is an adventure.

That’s how I want my new year to be.

There is an irony in life as we grow up. The more we experience, the more expectations we have about the world, the harder it is to be surprised or excited, the more easily we become unhappy.

I’ve done my commute hundreds of times in the city I now live in. I hardly notice anything anymore. Hundreds of days fold into one. A year flies by faster than the commute train. It was scary.

In traveler’s world, things are a bit different. The world seems to be brighter, with more sounds and colors, and move much slower. One day in a completely foreign land feels like weeks. Traveling stretches time like magic.

There is a special charm to see the world like that, as we have never seen it before.

Remember that first snow in our life, the first time we sat on an airplane, the first time getting lost in a foreign country, the first moment we discover our favorite flavor of ice cream. It was a childlike excitement — new, fresh, nervous, exciting.

Then we grew older. As we become the worldly travelers of life, it gets increasingly difficult to feel that thrill. The truth is, instead of dancing in a unfamiliar world, letting ourselves be showered by unknown and surprises, we try to fit our new experiences into the old ones — the grid or boxes we created to categorize the world. More often, we find ourselves saying this when something new comes along: “…This looks/sounds/tastes just like that.” Granted, it is human instinct to categorize unfamiliar experiences to what we’ve learned. It is our short cuts to deal with the dangerous world. But somewhere in the process, we lose the ability to look at something completely innocently, like a child, without judgement and stereotypes. We miss the chance to simply let the world surprises us as it plans.

That’s why I want to live like a traveler.

I want to live the world as I just arrived, without any expectations from what I think I may know. It is a simple but challenging process. It’s about trying to see the world for the first time. It’s about opening our eyes, ears, noses and hearts to really feel it. It’s about being like a kid, and find that curiosity that let us see the color, hear the sound, smell the air of the world again. It’s about really listening to someone’s story, without silently searching for labels to define who they are.

It’s about letting go. All the old knowledge we had about the past sometimes makes our new experiences jarringly similar and underwhelming. If we could let go those grids and boxes, we can be free. We will again be the observers of the world we come to know all these years.

This year, let’s all be travelers — -watch the world unfold as we have never seen before, and let it surprise us in its own way.

To all the travelers in foreign countries and at our own homes, happy new year!

— 01/02/2016, Russel Square, London