I’ve always talked about seeing the world.
When asked where I most want to go, my list goes on and on because I can’t pick just one place— I want them all. I dream of days with one-way tickets and soaking in unfamiliar cultures. I yearn for great adventures and breath taking sights. I want to know all kinds of people and create memories with them. I want to rough it and take chances, work odd jobs for a while and then move on. May I never settle for the good when I can have the best of this life. To me, that means loving people and exploring this earth until it all goes dark.
So as I prepare to live abroad for two months, why I am I so terrified?
For once in my life, my view of traveling now includes everything I have to leave behind. When I come back, my friends will have jokes I don’t understand. They’ll have ridiculous stories that I’m not a part of. My family will go on trips without me and the guy I like might go on dates with someone else. I’ll miss engagements, birthdays, and probably a celebrity death or two. Life is not going to stop, it’s going to plunge ahead full-force just like it always has. Coming back won’t be like pushing play on a paused movie; it’s going to be like sitting down in the middle of it and trying to catch up.
People ask about my trip: where I’m going, what I’m doing, how I got into it. I excitedly raddle off the details even if I know they’re only half listening. Usually, something will catch their attention and they ask why I’m going. It’s not the polite, “Oh, why are you going there?” type question. It’s more of the “Why in the world would you ever want to do that?” type. They want to know why I would give up my clean water, a three-inch thick mattress pad, and comfort foods for two months. They want to know why I’m going to a part of the world with poor healthcare and more diseases that could kill me than I can name. They want to know why I’m going to eat nothing but rice and granola bars for two months. They want to know why I would willingly live in a third world nation when I am sitting pretty here in America.
Wake up: there’s more to life than being comfortable.
No picture will ever be able to describe poverty like standing in the middle of it does. Nothing will make you feel more helpless than a massive language barrier and an urgent need to find something. Absolutely nothing will break your heart more than leaving a place and people and knowing that you might never see them again. And coming home… coming home will feel like extreme déjà vu for a while because you’re a completely different person. Things will seem vain. You’ll get irrationally angry when people say “first world problems.” You’ll fight with yourself about the point of it all and feel guilty for that three-inch thick mattress pad. Paying $10 for a meal will feel like buying a new house, especially when you know that 1.5 billion people live on less than $1.50 a day. Even coming home to the land of extreme comfort will make you uncomfortable.
But leaving will, too. I know in my core that I’m terrified to leave because nothing about what I’m doing is comfortable—going or returning. What’s even more unsettling though: What if I knew everything I do now, and still decided that it wasn’t worth it? That the world wasn’t worth seeing, that those people weren’t worth loving, that I wasn’t worth the journey?
Please never settle for comfortable, because there is so much more out there. There’s more to see, more to do, more people to love, more adventures to be had. More of yourself to find than you know to be possible.
Or you could stay here and be comfortable.
“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
-Jon Krakauer, "Into the Wild"
