Trust in the traveled man, it is he who’s opinions, experiences, thoughts, and views will be of most value to you. Every man and woman should aspire to at some point in their life live among those who are foreign to themselves, in turn making themselves alien to the world in which they have chosen to live.

While you may not always find home in the world outside your own, you shall surely find the ability to think differently by finding new perspectives and thoughts. At the very least, you will gain the uncommon awareness that the people you see, the food you eat, and the norms that dictate your society are not universal, forcing you to understand that adaptation is necessary and there is always more than one way in life.

Why the world of the travelled man is better is because he knows the world that was not built for his success, and has learned to live in it anyways, whereas most individuals find it difficult to succeed in their own environment that has been carefully crafted over hundreds and thousands of years to make life easier for those living in that place.

Culture is the testament to that, wherever you go look at the cultural aspects of it you will see that before it was art, expression, or tradition, it had been at one point a very relative practicality or meaning that pertained directly to the environment those people lived in to make it more habitable for themselves.

That is just in the cases of culture that is viewed as traditional, culture being the collection of things relating and pertaining to people throughout the years is constantly developing and suits different kinds of people from every corner of the world very specifically so that not every place may be habitable for those adjusted to a certain way of life. To learn to live in a place that was not molded for you is indeed a challenge and is not something everyone can do.

The people that can break past this barrier and not be thwarted by culture shock will have proven themselves to be possessing of the most necessary trait to any species, adaptability. Those that have the ability to change will take on obstacles and problems not in the way they took on the last, but in a way unique to its situation as is deserved. This, in turn, will heighten their chances of becoming successful people in their own home.

They will be able to assess life that they were once familiar and comfortable with and see how it is constructed. They will be able to draw reason from things that you might never have derived reason from. And from that fresh assessment of their world they will learn to navigate it where they used to blindly follow.

If you are traveled you will be a man of many friends as well as many places, and just as each place you have visited is unique and unlike any other, so too will your friends be. Friends influence each of us in such profound ways that if we look carefully we can see them rubbing off on us as we take on certain characteristics they have. The challenge is to make friends who are inherently different from yourself in the exterior of culture and background.

Even more challenging is to make friends with those whose ideas are different from your own, which in foreign countries is often an inevitable thing. This is the best way in which you can change yourself and find yourself open to being more than you felt you had to be in your home environment. Challenging as it may be, the traveled man will find that he can take on new, and possibly conflicting, ideas because of the relationships he has formed. While culture, language, architecture, governments, religion, etc. are all very influential aspects to yourself I will always believe that the people we encounter in life will be the very most impactful influence on ourselves. Those who have limited themselves to friends who think and see the world only as they do will miss out on the wonder and majesty of a million worlds to be discovered.

To be traveled is a way to say you’re open-minded and actually be able to back it up. Because you can’t go into places that don’t conform with your world and not be open to learn from it and accept that you are living in a place where you are not a matter of influence, but that you are the subject on which to feel influence. If you can’t take all that in then it’s because you are closed off to the possibility that your way, or the way of your society, is not the “right” way. Assuming of course that any one way is right is to claim that all others are wrong when there are in fact many ways.

For instance, our great enlightenment ideals of democracy surprisingly do not work in all parts of the world. Rebuilding governments to model our own does not work because of the millions of aspects that make their environment and situation different from our own. Does that mean that democracy is wrong? No, it just means that it doesn’t fit in a certain place at a certain time in space. Figuring out why something does and doesn’t fit is what makes you open-minded, and only those who give themselves the experience to explore that can know in themselves whether they can take that on. And while just about everyone you meet will claim that they are open-minded, we consistently find that the majority is not. However, if you have accepted a place and people to the point of living in a foreign land then it can be concluded you possess the ability to accept that which you may not always understand.

For these reasons, and much more not mentioned here, it should be accepted that the word of the traveled man should carry with it some weight. Ignorance is driven by the exclusion of the unfamiliar, simply because we are unfamiliar with it. To embrace the strange, whether it is comfortable or not tells the world you are not only accepting of ideas and perspectives but that you are capable to do so. Friends made, lands explored, subjugation under various governments. These are just a few things that expand your mind because like the dreamer who cannot dream past what his eyes have seen, it is very hard to think or behave in a different way if you are never exposed to it. Travel and gain wisdom, don’t be concerned with where you are going and don’t go for the enjoyment of a vacation where your expectation is that your new setting should pander to you. I challenge you to pander yourself to your new setting and see what you can gain from it. It may not be a vacation, but I truly believe that you will feel yourself a more valued individual.