How to Make the Most of Your Life: Travel and Live Like a Baby
Life is short, and painfully so. There’s no question about this universal sentiment. The tragically transient nature of life, however, is in part what lends to the beauty of it. You can only fill it with so many experiences given the finite amount of time you are allotted. It is then important to pay special heed to the type of experiences you undergo throughout your conscious existence. In the wake of famed neurologist Oliver Sacks passing, I came across his piece “Sabbath,” in which he ponders what a good life makes. This propelled me to think deeply about how I would define a fulfilling life for myself.
How Do You Measure a Good Life?
For me (and I’d venture to say for much of the masses), I think a good, meaningful life can be determined in terms of perceived length of one’s time and the quality of experiences that make up said time. The longer the time feels — and assuming it is of worthwhile quality — the better the life. So how can one achieve such an earthly existence? At the risk of sounding like a naive twenty-something with a penchant for platitudes, I believe that traveling can fulfill the above criteria for a good life. Now, hear me out.
The Relation Between Traveling and Two-Year-Olds
Imagine your formative childhood years. Across the board, it’s arguably so that these years felt subjectively longer than the present speed at which your years travel. There are many theories as to why this is so. Personally, I believe this ubiquitous phenomenon has to do with how novel your surrounding environment is and the new-ness of the situations you find yourself in.
Now compare the act of traveling with your formative years. There are many parallels. When you travel, or place yourself in a novel environment, you are metaphorically becoming a child again in that context and consequently expanding your perception of time. You are essentially transporting yourself into an extended situation in which you are effectively unfamiliar with your surroundings and forced to deduce how to properly behave and get by. You are living in a “not-quite-sure state of mind,” as I like to call it. Just as if you were a kid again, you are forced to learn and take on new challenges, whether you want to in the moment or not. But it’s not a dreadful experience. Although taxing, traveling and growing up are both stimulating and fulfilling.
Optimizing Your Perception of Time
People in general would rather live a long life as opposed to a short life. Yet, how long or short a life is cannot be measured merely in terms of years lived, for time is a completely subjective and relative experience. Imagine that Person A and Person B live the same length, 100 years. Person A spends her life in the comfort of her abode, doing exactly the same activities every day. Person B, on the other hand, makes a conscious effort to spice up her life by mixing up her daily routine, learning new skills, and visiting foreign places. It’s intuitive that subjectively, Person B lived a “longer life,” so to speak. A particular length of time could very well be perceived as short to one person and long to another, and therein lies the key to living a full life. Because time is an individual experience, it is paramount that we fill it with quality experiences that feel as long as they can be.
To me, a meaningful life does not necessarily entail grand achievements or gross financial success. Rather, a good life necessitates a subjective fullness of time, insofar as the time spent passing is one of meaning, self-cultivation, and learning — not one of vapid time-filling. And traveling provides just that sort of non-literal time extension. So the next time you’re stuck feeling like a cog in the machine, journey out to some unfamiliar terrain. It doesn’t even need to be some faraway fantastical land; just place yourself in a new environment. You can’t slow the tick-tock of the clock, but you can certainly get appropriately uncomfortable.
