The Impact of Traveling
Worse than jet lag
I live in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the nucleus of tech innovation where everybody wants to be, and where the future is created deep within exclusive meeting rooms. I park in Apple’s parking lot when I go to BJ’s for my favorite deep-dish pizza, Google bikes can be found around every corner during the lunch hour, Twitter company shirts sprinkle throughout my SoulCycle classes, and the Netflix offices are right across the street from the country club that I used to take tennis lessons at when I was 8. So why is it that I am so desperate to get out of this place? After much thought, I think I’ve found the answer to that question.
Traveling is the world’s biggest blessing as well as the world’s biggest curse. Once you venture outside of your own neighborhood, and once you see the world from outside of the bubble that you live in, your perspective changes. Your dreams get bigger and you yearn to escape the routine and reality of your everyday life.
Some of the best friends I’ve ever made are the ones that I met when I was five time zones from home, trying to navigate my life within the realms of foreign city maps and strange-looking currency. I don’t know how or why it works, but some of the people who have shaped me most in my life are the ones whom I only spent a few short weeks with. Late night conversations about life on the corner couch of a pub in London. Running around the entirety of Sydney with people I’d only just met that morning. Dance sessions in my homestay family’s living room while constructing homemade pizza with my Australian siblings. It’s those kinds of memories that will stay with me forever, in who I am and in who I become.
Traveling has provided me with some of the best memories of my entire life, but it has also made me yearn for more out of my everyday life. Sometimes I feel like the routine consistency of my life weighs down upon my brain like a pile of blankets suffocating my senses, and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
