The world is a vast, open space. It is filled with billions of different kinds of people, in thousands of amazing places. With varying cultures, hundreds of different languages, and a history so rich it would take someone over a lifetime to learn it all- if that were even possible.
For this reason, I believe that humans were never meant to stay in one place their whole lives.
With so much to discover, so many places to see and so many people to meet, I could never get it in my head why my fellow peers were all so content with never venturing outside their lives in their little isolated town in Upstate New York.
Hidden in the woods, in a large tan house, was where I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence. I went to a school where everyone knew everyone, and that didn’t bother anybody. I would watch my classmates mingle around me like a separate entity. It did not take me long to realize that I would never belong here. It was a feeling of isolation that I will never forget.
But I remember the first time I went away. Not on a holiday trip with my family, not on a field trip with my class. I mean the first time I really went away.
It was the day I turned 16. I boarded an airplane by myself and it took me across the ocean to a world I never even knew existed; a world I never knew I was longing to see. It was like discovering a secret place that everyone was trying to hide from me.
In the United Kingdom, people still speak English. They are all still busy and hustling along, and no one is any particularly nicer. But there was something about that place that gave me a new hope. I guess it was the fact that nobody knew who I was.
Labels do not exist in the mind of a traveler.
You are not the person that got gum put in your hair by some mean older students. You are not the kid who cried because your science project didn’t win first place, or because your team didn’t win their little league championship. You are not the person who got picked last for class, or rejected by that certain someone, or got into a fight while trying to stand up for yourself, or had your diary read in front of the whole school. Whoever you were before is not who you are when you travel.
That’s the true beauty of traveling.
I have met some of the best people I could have ever hoped to have come across. Perhaps they too were trying to be someone new. Perhaps they were running from a small town, or a suburbia backyard that they had grown too familiar with, or the same city streets they walked every day. Perhaps they were running from other people. People who forced them to be the same person they were since middle school; people who forced them into a label.
It is my firm belief that people are not meant to stay in one place their whole lives, nor are they meant to stay the same person that they were. People are meant to grow. The person you are when you die will not be the same person you were when you graduate high school, or marry your spouse, or even wake up tomorrow morning.
It is for this reason that I urge people to travel. It doesn’t have to be across the world, it doesn’t even have to be for a long period of time. It just has to be someplace new. Someplace out of your comfort zone. Someplace where you might have the opportunity to meet some new people and expand who you are as a person.
Sometimes you need to run away. And sometimes that’s okay.
