When was the last time, you did something for the first time? The fast-paced lives we lead, and the never-ending piles of bills to pay, claims millions of lives each year to submit to monotony and corners the weak into dark crevices of safety. Travel sounds brutal. It forces you to trust in strangers, leave your comfort zones behind and walk away from the constant-loving embraces of friends and family. It pushes you off balance, and thrives on adrenaline. Travel is risky. And that is exactly why you should invest in it!
‘When will you begin the long journey into yourself?’, is a profound thought once professed by the famous Persian poet, Rumi. The simple question had pulled the strings of my lost mind into helpless introspection. Like everyone else, I had precariously jumped the bait to accepting monotony as a way of life. The rat race was competitive, but the sight of everyone else running nevertheless was comforting at the same time. I, like millions of others had chosen safety, too fearful of change and movement. Too afraid of investing time and energy into anything, but the trends of the hour. Until the day I decided to invest in travel.
It is when you stretch your eyes to the end of the horizon, overwhelming doused with the entirety of the world surrounding you, that your problems will all seem trivial. It is the sight of the crimson sun, setting over the soft ripples that will make solitude feel like a luxury that you can now afford. It is when you wake up in different lands, that you’re overcome with an adrenaline rush to seek new adventures every day. It is when you share a smile with a stranger on the bus, you find a friend in them without spoken words. It is when you travel with people you’ve never met before, you develop perception and become inept to prejudices. It is when you share stories with locals, you soak in culture and the magic of diverse lives. It is when a stranger offers you a bite of his food on the go, you begin to believe in selfless gestures again.
Travel changes you forever. It permanently imprints you with memories of places you’ve been to and people you’ve met. You end up leaving pieces of yourself on every land you’ve step foot on, and you move to another place nevertheless. There will be pieces of you all over the world, like a jigsaw puzzle someday you’ll pick pieces left behind by another wandering soul. Together you will paint a colorful picture on the globe. 10 years from now, it won’t matter if you have the perfect job and the perfect life, if you haven’t set your foot out of your cabin. You will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do, than the things you did. And then there is the most dangerous risk of not doing what you want , over the bet that you will find the freedom to do it later.
For what they say is true, travel is like love. The most heightened sense of realization and being. A complete awareness of your soul. Where we submit ourselves to unfamiliarity and are fearless of transformation. And that is why, the best trips, like the best love stories, never really end…
