Here is an excerpt from my book, which is actually an entry from my personal journal….which is largely how I wrote an entire book in about 3 months:
Travelling is the Great Reset Button. Whatever you thought or thought you thought can and probably will be erased with enough time on the road. Everything you hold dear is useless somewhere in the world. What were your problems can become your assets; what was taboo is accepted. There are places sex is free and religion never heard of. There are people whose beauty will be ugly to you and whose paradise would be our prison. Travelling wipes it all away, sometimes the good with the bad, but it’ll show you that life can be so many different things and how dare anyone claim they have a monopoly on the truth.
People get their cars and phones and TVs and a little money and they think they know who they are and what life is. But they’re too stationary to know anything. If you drive that car, and talk to the same people, and sit on the same sofa everyday you’re a fixture the same as the your living room furniture. Those things you think you control have become you. They’ve defined your life for so long you’re not separate from them. If you took all that stuff away you would be left with someone who’d finally realize they didn’t know anything except how to use that money to buy a phone to talk to those same old people about stuff they’d forgotten why they cared about in the first place.
But thats how you come to know. Remove every one of the things that you have and strap on a backpack with a change of clothes and a tootbrush and just go without direction. Don’t let anything define your life. Let reality pass by so fast it blurs and whatever is left is you. That is the only way to really know yourself. If you learn something sitting still it only applies if props stay the same, but when you learn something travelling you know it for good and always..
I don’t really know if I agree with that anymore…or at least wholly. It is true that there are things you can only learn about yourself on the road.
It is very easy to get lost in the things and forget why you were doing it in the first place. It is true that the props define your life for so long they become you. And that is the place where I disagree with myself: The props become part of who you are. You can’t leave them and learn about yourself on the road because you have literally left yourself behind. The person you would learn about on the road would not be the person you really are….that person is partly defined by a set of props.
I guess my main departure is that before I considered the props to be a hinderance to learning about who you really are. But props can be good. You are defined by where you live, the sports you play, the friends you keep, your car, clothes, house, job, etc. Most people don’t really care that these things control their life….most people would consider these things as having a life. And that is one of the downsides of travel.
Travel has allowed me to know myself in a way few will ever experience. I know what I am like when nothing from the past and nothing familiar defines me. I know who I am at night when there is nothing else there. But I am not sure it has allowed me to know myself better…just differently.
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