Photo by: Rangefinder/flickr
To travel is to temporarily live outside time. Travelling allows you to appreciate what you usually take for granted. Ordinary, everyday things like hopping on a bus, purchasing food from convenience stores, saying thank you (perhaps in a different language) to someone who gives you way in the street. It all becomes a charming and exciting experience. You are existing outside the familiar; in a place devoid of your usual routine, and everything is felt in the here and now.
There is a famous quote by author, philosopher Dagobert D. Runes that sums up one of the unique peculiarities of travel:
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home'.
It might sound a bit wry, but the statement is essentially true. A bus hurtling down a road full of potholes and danger, with people who are dressed different to you, look different to you and sound different to you, is a lot more exciting than riding your local bus from your house to the shops. Everything is immediate and outlandish as you are transformed into a fully conscious voyeur, watching life unfold in a way you have never experienced before.
But it is not encountering the unusual that is the most compelling aspect of travelling. Rather it is the moment when you begin to recognize the familiar in all the differences that the true essence of travel comes into force. The street vendor is a father with four beautiful children; the shop-keeper next door to the hostel you are staying at was once the school beauty who still thinks she is beautiful (and she is); the locals, the sightseers, the trekkers, the party-goers, the soul-searchers are all just people, all with their own past, their own history and dreams. Just like you, and just like me.
Live within the safety and confinement of your local community and you are bound to become complacent. Instead academics, travel writers/bloggers, politics and media will shape your understanding of the world outside. In time, with all the responsibility that being a human entails in our fiercely competitive societies you will cease to ask questions. The world will appear to be a place demarcated by borders and accepted for its alterity.
It is only when you travel and immerse yourself somewhere ridiculously unfamiliar will you realise that actually no place is foreign. No one is foreign. No view, no mountain, no ocean.
We all have our own reasons for travelling. But when we travel we all experience the same thing: that is, a re-connection with the world from which we all at one point become estranged. This occurs because we allow it to occur. We travel expecting to be fascinated by difference, but it will rather be the similarities in the differences: the friendships, the stories, the togetherness that will end up fascinating the most.
Travel, step outside time and rekindle your kinship with the world that has always been yours.
Written by - Dina Rai