A Love of Travel
I’m closing in on the final weeks of an 18-month sabbatical that I began last March.
The opportunity for this sabbatical emerged from an acquisition of my late company, Venga, at which I’d spent the precious five years. I’m extremely fortunate to have had the privilege of taking this year and a half to travel throughout the US, Morocco, Central Europe, and Southeast East Asia.
A close friend asked me a couple weeks ago if I could articulate what it is that I love about travel. His question led me to reflect not only on my answer, but also on how my answer to that question has evolved over the past 18 months.
There are so many things to love about travel- the opportunity to see new places, experience new cultures, meet new people.
I’m emerging from the end of this journey with a sharper answer to his question than I had at the beginning…an answer with three components.
1. Our personal perspective on the nature of reality is largely a reflection of the environment that we happen to be born into. This perspective is broadened by the people we meet and cultures we experience through travel. When we broaden our perspective on the nature of reality, we give ourselves the opportunity to assess whether or not the values that we’ve inherited from our environment are in fact representative of our true values.
2. There is an inverse relationship between our perception of time and the variety of our life experience. The greater the variety of our experience, the slower we perceive time to pass. With travel, comes variety. This caused the past 18 months to feel as long as the previous five years. By committing to lives of experiential variety, we enable ourselves to hack our perception of time and to live, in essence, much longer lives.
3. With travel comes forced minimalism. Two years ago I was living in a townhouse, then in a series of short-term apartments, out of a camper van, and finally out of a backpack. With each step of this progression, I was forced to thin out my possessions, narrowing down to what is truly essential. There is something liberating about owning nothing more than one needs. I’ll admit though that my fiancée, Courtney, still gives me a hard time because for me that short list included a battery-powered fan that I carried around the world in my backpack for six months.
