Change On The Road: Has Travel Affected Your Life?

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

– Miriam Beard, American author, traveler, born in England (1901-1983)

An important part of the book I want to write about travel involves change. Here’s the beginning of an examination of the phenomenon that’s affected travelers since the first time someone wondered what lies beyond the distant horizon, and went off to find out.

Travel changes a person.

How often have you heard that?

For centuries travelers have talked about the changes that overcame them while exploring the world.

Today when travelers gather the topic still often turns to how venturing onto the road changed their views and outlook on life.

But is it really true, an empirical fact, a foregone conclusion, or some kind of collective illusion that travel really changes a person?

Do all travelers feel the same way? Do travelers in groups feel the same change that solo travelers do?

What’s the nature of the change that takes place? Is it magical or mystical, a fait accompli, or simply practical in nature? Does it come about suddenly? Over time? What exactly changes?

Is it lasting, a permanent change? Or a feeling that fades with time away from travel?

What exactly is it about travel that results in change?

While I believe my life has changed significantly as a result of travel, I still couldn’t give a definitive answer to many of these questions.

But since my turn to travel from an unsatisfying life in retirement is the crux of the memoir I’m proposing to write, the topic warrants closer examination.

And, since I’d like to involve readers of this blog in the writing process, I want to share my observations with yours, and together perhaps reach a better collective understanding of change through travel than my experience alone might reveal.

So just what is this mysterious transformation so many travelers talk about?

“You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back.”

Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

Going Home

Some people don’t realize they’ve changed until they return from an extended period of international travel and find out nothing at home is the same as it was when they left.

“What changed?” they wonder. ”The place where I came from? Or me?”

You return from a long trip and your friends aren’t interested in all those unforgettable travel stories you brought back with you. After a few days, the old routines in your former stomping grounds seem tired, meaningless, utterly unfulfilling.

Before long, your traveler’s soul aches to be back on the road.

Has that ever been your experience?

I met a 30-something Portuguese woman in Istanbul recently who works to travel. She saves her money and holidays to visit at least a couple of new countries a year.

Bruna and I talked over lunch after a free walking tour of the famous tourist area of Sultanahmet in Istanbul, home of the magnificent, centuries-old Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, and Grand Bazaar.

She likes to travel with friends but mostly she travels solo because her friends rarely have the same weeks off that she does. I asked her if travel had brought change to her life. Her eyes opened wide, head nodding yes. 

Mostly from solo ventures, she said. She gained confidence knowing she can be comfortable with herself on the road in foreign locales. She knows she can handle problems that may arise, and that confidence has carried over to her work and life at home.

But either way, solo or with friends, her travels also opened her eyes to different cultures and how other people live in the world. Her friends who don’t travel miss that by going on the same vacations year after year, never venturing beyond their own limited horizons.

“It’s difficult to understand why they just keep going to the same familiar places over and over,” she said. “They have the money to travel to other countries and see the world, but they don’t.”

A Substitute Addiction

Bruna described a feeling that travelers express in various ways. Once you start exploring the world outside of familiar environs, it becomes invigorating, life-affirming, even addictive.

In my case, a compulsion to travel supplanted a near life-long daily cannabis habit. Not only was it inconvenient and often dangerous to acquire and smoke weed in unfamiliar foreign countries while traveling, I was feeling more than enough stimulation from travel itself to miss getting high. My chronic use of weed for the buzz became a fading afterthought, an amusing memory of a past life. I was having way too much fun traveling without it. That was a big change in my life.

Controlling Emotions

“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”

Native American author William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

Another important change that came about for me while traveling was to free myself from the debilitating affliction of my own emotions.

As a young adult I found it difficult to stay composed in situations where strong emotions would rise to the surface.

Growing older, I often fought the sudden shudder that led to a raspy voice and teary eyes when talking about meaningful events in my life, embarrassing me in both private and public speaking.

Not until I started traveling did I begin to address this, first by asking myself, what’s wrong with crying?

Then I made it an informal practice on the road to sing, laugh, dance and yes, cry, every day, making a private display of my emotions, and talking openly and publicly to people about them. Often, to their puzzlement, I would explain that practicing them helped put me on a more even emotional keel, not subject to a sudden release of repressed feelings. It didn’t always stop the tears, but I was simply more willing to let them take their natural course, actually making me stronger when I did.

Now when I feel tears start to flow, I feel confident in the strength of my emotions, not weakness or embarrassment. I just let them go.

That was a significant change in my temperament that came in part as a result of following simple advice that I found serendipitously at the very outset of my journey.

14 Commandments of Travel

While planning my journey, I struggled for months to come up with some kind of philosophy or guide to how I should conduct myself as a traveler. How should I act? How should I treat people I meet as strangers in their home country? What kind of person did I want to be?

Instinctively, I knew some change would come about from traveling, but I had difficulty articulating what it might be until I discovered a small poster on the wall of a diner in Miami, Florida, my last stop in the U.S. before beginning my international sojourn in Central America.

High on a wall cluttered with old movie posters and celebrity photos, between Robert De Niro and Brigitte Bardot, was an untitled list of 14 recommendations for nothing in particular, which I took to be aimed directly at me. It was exactly what I was looking for.

I took them to heart and dubbed them my 14 Commandments of Travel. They relaxed me in such a commonsense way that travel became much easier, and much more enjoyable. They seemed a bit of travel magic that was irresistible, meant to be there only for me, opening my mind to be more accepting, open, respectful, generous and kind, and to let go of whatever emotional baggage that might weigh me down or hold me back.

This social doctrine made me understand how to conduct myself in a way that would make my travels truly meaningful and worthwhile, which was to treat people well, to respect them and their culture for who and what they are, to be generous and kind.

“Travel is not about where you go and what you see, it’s about the people you meet and the friends you make along the way.”

DHB

While changing myself from within, this changed the value of my interactions with people in the world, and taught me the true value of travel. It’s not about where you go and what you see, it’s about the people you meet and the friends you make along the way.

This simple revelation changed my understanding of travel from the outset and gave me a bright new and rewarding outlook that’s affected every aspect of my life.

I believe that if I’d stayed home in retirement and continued living as I was, I’d have died sooner or later still embarrassed to express my emotions, still shy about meeting people, and still woefully ignorant of the world and the people who live beyond the borders of the country of my birth.

Is Going Solo the Best Way?

I’m not afraid to acknowledge my conceit in the belief that only solo travel provides the necessary crucible in which travel changes are forged. Going alone forces you out of the habits and comforts that steer you along the same paths you always took. Once you start blazing your own trail, you have the time to think deeply about your life and make any changes you have a mind to make, unfettered by predisposition or expectations.

Traveling with a group tends to reinforce prejudices and the status quo of members of the group without examination.  

 Once you are on the road, traveling solo, you are an unsculpted lump of clay. You can be anyone you want, or no one at all. You have a choice of who you want to be. No one knows you. No one has any expectations of you. No one will question you if they see you doing something different or out of the norm that someone else expects you to conform to.

Once over the fear of stepping out into the world on your own, and finding out that you can navigate your own way, you start shedding fears about a whole lot of other things, such as walking up to strangers and starting conversations, because when you travel solo you’re unlikely to meet people any other way.

Fear disappears. Hesitancy evaporates. You can take the full plunge into a life you make new, all your own.

This deep, personal dive is one of several themes that I think will play its way through what I write about my life and travels in this blog, ultimately resulting in a book about how I got to this point in life, living though dreams I never knew I had.

Now let me know what you think about travel and change. I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories.