Just a few weeks ago, I returned home from a nine week trip to Asia. While teaching in Cambodia, Hong Kong and Laos was an amazing opportunity, I realized something as I stepped off the plane after over 50 hours of traveling. I actually hate it. I hate traveling. This may come as a shock to those who know me personally. I have been to multiple continents, lots of countries and have talked extensively about how I wish to move overseas after I graduate Corban in the spring, but I hate traveling. It's not that traveling is bad, or that I don't love the memories and countries I have been to; it's that I do not like what comes with traveling.
When you travel, you usually meet new people and form deep relationships, which is fantastic for the duration of the trip, but painful when you return home. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Seattle, I had to come to grips with the fact that I may never see my teammates again. Having been gone for over two months, these total strangers had reached a level where I didn't view them as simply friends. Those people are my family, and I may never see them again. That is a very painful reality and is what happens when you travel.
Additionally, visiting a new country makes you experience things you have no basis to handle. While in Cambodia, we visited two locations remnant of the genocide that occurred in the mid 1970s. We walked where people had died. It is impossible to leave a location like that unchanged. You will be changed when you travel. What do you do with that? How do you process those new emotions and experiences? It isn't something you can process quickly once you're in country with your teammates. This experience will follow you forever, whether good or bad. The blunt truth is that your friends and family stateside will never understand or be able to help you.
Traveling also changes you as a person. The fact of the matter is, I am not the same person I was in May. If you have travelled overseas, you are not the same person you were before the trip, and that is okay! That's actually amazing! That is what traveling does. It forces you to leave your comfort zone and live your life in a new and sometimes unorthodox (shout out to anyone who has ever used a squatty potty!) way. When you return stateside, you are a new person. You will see things differently. You will feel emotions you may have never felt before. After my first time to China, I cried in the face wash aisle in Walmart. I didn't know how to choose a face wash where I could read the labels and there were about twenty choices, so I cried in the aisle and had my mom choose one. I was changed. After I spent a month in Cambodia, I can see that my dreams and passions have changed in ways I don't understand and that I don't know how to handle. For others, they have seen our Father work in unimaginable ways and their faith has deepened.
You see, the bottom line is that I hate traveling because it has completely ruined me for the ordinary. Traveling has taught me how to live in a way where I truly LIVE, and that is not an easy thing. It takes work to live deeply and intentionally. Because I travel, I can't go back to a mundane, ordinary lifestyle. I think Anthony Bourdain gets this when he writes,
"Travel isn't always pretty. It isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But, that's okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your consciousness, and on your heart, on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind."
To travel is to change, and to change is uncomfortable; however, sometimes life's most beautiful moments have been when we are uncomfortable. So, travel. Travel often and travel well, but know that when you travel, you will ruin the ordinary.
