With Christmas coming up, maybe some of you are going on holiday with your family to another country. If so, you are very lucky and I am very jealous. I hope you enjoy the culture, the food, and the new terrain and document your adventures with lots of photographs and memories.
Travel is one of the few ways to truly expand your horizons beyond the comforts of your home state.
I am fortunate enough to have been able to travel to other countries in the past few years, and I'm here to tell you why traveling should be at the top of your bucket list.
Besides being a wonderful opportunity to expand your iPhone photography skills, travel allows you to appreciate the culture of another area of the world the way it was meant to be experienced.
Going to a quasi-culture festival in your home state and eating "authentic" food is always a fun time, but it is totally different from actually eating at a restaurant in Italy or South Africa with a possible language barrier and tasting tried-and-true authentic cuisine.
You feel a different vibe and gain a whole new appreciation for the years of culture that brought the dish you ate to the table. An old adage says food brings people closer together, and looking your cook in the eye and saying thank you with an empty plate breaks transcends cultural roadblocks and centers you back to simple people interactions.
With the craziness that goes on in the world, that kind of interaction is dangerously close to disappearing but is vital to a globe that yearns to stay together.
Traveling centers you back to what is really important in life. This one is imperative as the world becomes closer through digital screens and material goods and further apart through interpersonal interactions. While the newest iPhone may be the most important thing to you, food and water may be the most important thing to the person next to you on the train in Russia. My favorite way to express this is to tell of an experience I had while traveling in South Africa two years ago.
I was traveling back to our resort in a tourist van from an excursion with our Dutch tour guide. We passed through a village with women with baskets on their heads and children with no shoes on. The local supermarket had a line wrapped around the building. I asked our guide whether there was a sale going on or a good deal on a particular food item. He calmly answered no, that it was the first of the month and the villagers had just gotten their wages for the month and were getting their monthly food supply.
That's right, monthly wage for their monthly food supply. I glanced at my phone, and the date glared back at me: August 1st, 2016. While I had been worried about starting college and how to decorate my dorm, there were people who worked all day and had never seen the inside of a new car or seen their siblings graduate from college.
And. They. Were. Happy. That experience grounded me in what should be valued in life, and I know that would not have come from Charlottesville, Virginia.
Travel makes your world feel huge and your person feel small. When I was standing on top of a glacier in Iceland this past summer, I couldn't help but feel that my life was not meant to be bogged down by own criticisms or criticisms of others. Living was more than working 13 hours a day and living in the anxiety that seems to consume the modern world. I couldn't take myself so seriously because life was clearly going on without me, whether or not I chose to live it. It is liberating and exhilarating, and you have no obligation to anything that you don't want to do. Absolutely none.
All of these reasons have nothing to do with the photos I took or the social media storm that followed. More often than not college students get caught up in the race to what seems like the shining adult world, only to find out we missed the greatest parts along the way. I urge you to travel, not because it's the "cool" thing to do, but to find out what your life really means and to discover the part you play in the game of life.
I guess this is my bottom line: travel taught me how lucky I am to be where I am in life and have the experiences that I have, way more than anything else I have ever experienced growing up in the United States. Challenge yourself to see something new and you may be the one to come back enlightened and enriched with life lessons that gave you a whole new appreciation for yourself.