Whether you're on a plane, a train, a car, a bus, or in a yellow taxi cab, the journey is the same. Sometimes we travel to visit family or friends. Sometimes we head out to a new destination to celebrate the holiday season, other times we board a plane for the pure joy of it in order to find a new place to help us grow.
Whether you are old or young, traveling is an important and fulfilling experience. It is one that will always bring new memories, good or bad, and always help you grow as a person. Every experience is unique and it can challenge us in many ways that we did not even feel were possible. It may not even be the destination that makes us feel different and act differently than how we once did. Rather, it may be the journey to get us there that changes us forever.
Plane rides bring new faces, many of which you will never see again, and new conversations. You can learn something new from a stranger or something enlightening can happen. For a suspended moment in time, it is just you and hundreds of other passengers suspended in the air and experiencing the same moment. Some are heading to their daughter's wedding, brother's funeral, a family reunion, or a necessary vacation. Others are dropping off their kids at college for the first time or taking their children on their first trip to Europe. Everyone holds a different story, but, for a few hours, a piece of the story is the same for everyone.
Traveling to a new destination can bring us closer to new cultures that we have never seen and new types of people who we have never met. We get to experience new foods and find hidden roads with cute little shops selling a million trinkets. We learn to see the world with bigger, brighter eyes, reminding ourselves to get out there and experience all that the world has to offer. The world is filled with hidden alleyways that all have something grand to offer, we just have to go out there and find them. Each one can teach us something new about ourselves or about how we want to live our lives. Traveling is not always about the destination, but about the journey that can feed our souls.
