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Welcome back to Thank God It’s Monday!
tl;dr We are so blinded by our own experience in life we forget how to appreciate the perspective of everyone else. It’s important to be able to adopt another lens to view life because it creates a greater connection to humanity and the collective whole (universe/soul/energy/etc). Travel is therefore not just a luxury, but a necessity to connect with that oneness of the world.
I will try to keep it brief as I am very fortunate to be sitting a crosswalk away from the beautiful Costa Rican beach. But this topic weighs heavily on my conscious from time to time and it dutifully coincides with travel.
This quote from Mark Twain I used in TGIF last week eloquently sums it up: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
The power of travel to shift your view of the world cannot be understated. It uproots you from your comfortable, familiar spot in the Earth and shakes you so hard that when you return home you cannot help but see the world in a completely new way. It gains you a perspective that is impossible to acquire from staying in the same place your entire life.
It’s easy to forget that there are other viewpoints from which to dwell in life when you are overwhelmed by your day-to-day tasks. Work is engrossing, staying in shape and/or having children occupies most of your free time, and every night your head hits the pillow swimming with to-do’s and what-didn’t-get-done’s.
We’re all guilty of forgetting there is a world to experience around us because life gets in the way. But digging yourself out of this hole of quick sand is necessary for connecting to that greater oneness that exists.
Everyone has a different name and relationship with this oneness. Maybe it’s a religious unifier, or maybe just a spiritual link to a greater energy. Maybe you don’t believe in any greater power but you recognize a common human experience that is shared transcendent to culture, age, and religion. Whatever that underlying energy is flowing through the universe means to you, it is easy to forget in the mundane happenings of the day.
When we forget about this oneness (which will represent the aforementioned ideas for the remainder of the edition), it is easy to hate people. It’s easy to curse the guy who cut you off in traffic, to look down upon those who do not look like you, and to hate those that have a culture unfamiliar to you. Without the sense of oneness in humanity, there is no humanity at all, it simply becomes human versus human.
Travel pulls back this veil that starts to shroud the goodness of humanity. Seeing different places, talking with different people, celebrating different customs helps rekindle this sense of humanity. When you don’t totally understand the words a person speaks but can laugh over a common human thing, you celebrate humanity. When you don’t have the same customs as another person but can empathize with the joy or sorrow that is observed, you celebrate humanity.
Traveling has brought me some of the most humbling and human experiences for which I am so grateful for. Singing around a campfire in Nicaragua, talking with the doctor running a hospital in Haiti, and having a drink at a local pub in Ireland have created that overwhelming sensation of oneness. They have reminded me that people are people, everywhere, and we are all living the human experience.
I don’t mean to sound tone deaf in saying that I think travel is essential to gaining the full human experience. But those who are fortunate enough to have discretionary income after shelter, safety, food, water, and the essentials should seek the oneness that is woven throughout our world, all over the world.
And just to address the elephant in the room: to the xenophobic air that is conspicuously being ignored, even celebrated in the US recently, I will rephrase a joke I heard on social media over the weekend, “The sun is a reminder to white people that [we] are immigrants too.” (I wish I remembered who the comedian was to credit but did he hit the nail on the head- I will vouch for my inevitable sunburn I will be returning home with).
So whether you want to hop on a plane to a new continent or if you can hop on the subway to a different community, go somewhere new. Find a custom you’re unfamiliar with and educate yourself. Watch two people have a conversation in a language you don’t know and appreciate how much you can gather from tone and body language. Talk with someone who you might not have otherwise interacted with to gain a new perspective.
There is so much humanity to celebrate out there and if we can only remember to look for it, we can find the oneness among the billions of amazing humans.
If you found some value in this, please share it with a friend you think would enjoy it! And let me know if you’d like to be added to get TGIM.
This week my recommendation is from Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck Podcast, “How to Change Your Mind Without Losing Yourself.”
With that, hit reply and let me know what your favorite travel experience was.
Until next time,
Shannon
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