Growing up, I was fortunate enough to have the concept of travel instilled into my life. I yearned to see places that I read about in books, and saw in pictures. I read about the Seven Wonders of the World and became desperate to view them in person rather than through pixels on paper. My reality became an insatiable need to hop on a plane and make it work. To this day, that need, while has been fed numerous times, might never be enough.

I’m the kind of person who always wants to be somewhere they are not. I have an innate desire to travel the world, experience different cultures, meet new people, and explore passions that haven’t yet settled deep within my soul and affect who I am as a young, curious human. I find myself searching for ways to view life through an objective lens, and understand that my personal experiences and encounters will, no doubt, shape my viewpoints. Each person has a unique “lens,” and THAT is the beauty of the diversity in this world.

Why is travel so addictive? I’ve written numerous times about this topic, and each time I find myself drawing the same conclusion: travel is the antidote for ignorance. We live life in a metaphorical bubble. As we age, this bubble grows in size and we add more things to our space of understanding and living. When we are young, we don’t need a lot in our bubble to keep us happy and satisfied. Our scope of the world extends to our family, our basic needs, and our imagination.

Over the passing years, this bubble that contains all that we know and are, extends to more people. We go to school, make more friends, play sports, discover music, we can read more advanced novels, and we branch out from our home to different places. As our mind grows, so does this bubble.

Now, some might say that this “bubble” we live in can be diminished simply by new, life-altering experiences in the comfort of our own community. Yes, that is undeniable. However, in pertains to traveling in particular, something beautiful happens to this bubble the moment you step off an airplane in another country with which you have limited knowledge of. The bubble disappears.

For those of you who recall your first time in another country, this feeling is unparalleled. We are left to our own devices of connecting with other humans solely on the basis that we ARE human. We don’t know of their culture, and they are unsure of ours. We have stepped into a realm of uncertainty and an anxious space of trying to make our way through a world that we are not accustomed to. We communicate with the people of the culture we have embedded ourselves in, and we try to fit in based on what we observe.

Our preexisting beliefs of that culture either become more solidified with our experiences there, or they are shattered, and we can truly see that we are all alike in more ways than we imagined. We integrate ourselves in that other place and delve into the amazing things that country has to offer. Our bubble disappears because our perspective is widened to something that is so much greater than us.

Traveling and experiencing a foreign life is the key to understanding, and understanding feeds our mind and soul to be a more wholesome, accepting human. So the question is, what is the ignorance travel cures? It is our ignorance to how similar we all are, and that just because someone has more melanin in their skin, eats different snacks throughout the day, lives deep within a jungle or bustling city, we are all searching for a way to belong here on Earth.

A year ago today, I had just arrived in Thailand. I was there for two weeks through a volunteer program living in the jungle, teaching English, providing water sustainable sources and building roads for the villagers, exploring the city of Chiang Mai, river rafting for three days, and hiking the jungle to find elephants. It was action packed, physically tolling, emotionally charged, and greatest two weeks of my life. I immersed myself in the culture and the environment so intensely that I never once had a moment missing the faraway place I called home.

What struck me about the villagers who reside in Northern Thailand is this: They are, by American standards, “poor,” but I have never witnessed anyone with so little, being SO purely happy. I connected with the students I taught through laughter, smiling, gestures, and playing soccer outside of the school. It was a process of pointing to a picture of “pants,” saying the word, and then pointing to the pants they were wearing. Nothing compared to the smile on their face and mine when they would say the word back, and point to the picture in understanding.

It was a human interaction, and it was rewarding beyond anything I had ever experienced. We would arrive back to our housing exhausted from playing with the kids and teaching them all day, but the moment we heard them running out to the trucks as we arrived at the school in the morning made it worth every second.

My perspective was broadened, and what used to seem important to me, wasn’t so important anymore. The previous need to reach for my phone was gone. The need to post on social media vanished. I was living the life I wanted for myself, so there was no need to make others believe it. We are now so quick to hold up a device to capture a moment rather than view it with our own two eyes.

On an adventure such as the one I embarked on, there were moments that I had to just sit there and gaze out at the beauty of the land and people that were before me, because I knew those moments were too precious to not hold onto with every natural part of my being. Those are the moments that true purpose is discovered.

You feel connected to something. That connectedness is what eradicates our ignorance. That connection -- to a place, a feeling, a person -- is what allows us to feel a sense of belonging, and that belonging is a feeling that is irreplaceable and leaves a mark on who we are as a person.

I wrote this at 5:30 am, sitting on a bench outside of our hostel, in the city of Chiang Mai, in my journal:

“I’ve been so desperate to go on the quest to ‘find myself,’ and this trip has made come to understand that sometimes you have to let the places you are and the people you meet change your perspective. Through a fresh and open-minded perspective, that’s when you become a better and more authentic human. That is when you’ll ‘find yourself,’ and everything will fall into place.”

I challenge you all to search for what makes you feel alive, hold onto the people who challenge you and make you a better person, and find the places that ignite your wanderlust, and become your antidote for ignorance.