Last update: 03 March, 2017
Traveling is a way to break the routine and enjoy that feeling of well-being that comes from exploration, discovery and surprise.
In the past, traveling to a distant country practically meant a change of life. These trips lasted months, or even years, because the time it took to travel was very long indeed. Today things have changed. We can get to any country in the world in less than two days or, if we're lucky with connections, maybe even less than one.
When you travel, you learn, you change your perspective, you renew yourself. The journey is an invitation to get out of our everyday life and give ourselves the opportunity to bring out other sides of us that perhaps due to routine or habit had remained asleep.
Changing context causes our entire subjective world to become active within us; furthermore, the challenges we will face will require us to exploit skills or knowledge other than those we normally employ.
"Traveling is an exercise that has fatal consequences for prejudice, intolerance and narrow-mindedness."
-Mark Twain-
Traveling transports us to territories that we will feel as less predictable, because in those new contexts there are many contingent relationships that we do not know. This uncertainty can cause a certain nervousness, but also a lot of excitement and a desire for adventure. Born travelers have a real need for this adrenaline; sporadic travelers, on the other hand, know that these emotions remind us how beautiful life is.
When we travel, we step out of our comfort zone. We allow ourselves to broaden our horizons of the world and of life. But the best thing is that, perhaps without realizing it, we introduce a stimulus that increases our intellectual abilities, which makes us more creative and which develops many of our social and emotional skills.
Traveling is a source of creativity
It is said that a trip makes us happy three times: when we plan it, when we make it and when we remember it. These three stages require enormous creativity. It is required when the time comes to choose the destination of our journey, when we have to think about what we like, what we are looking for and what are the things that each destination can offer us.
Even while traveling, we have to put our creativity into play, whether we like it or not. We arrive in an unknown place or, at least, not very usual for us. We must immediately start adapting in different ways: we must get used to the customs and traditions of the place, the food, the habits, the means of transport, etc. Furthermore, if the goal is far away, we will also have to adapt to different social interactions and to another language.
When we remember the trip, finally, we will choose a certain way to organize and give meaning to those memories. We recreate them, associate them and choose the most relevant aspects of that experience. We interpret what we have experienced.
All these processes, observed as a whole, amount to complex intellectual activities. It's almost like writing a book. Almost like drawing, developing a project, putting it into action and then evaluating it. Many of our intellectual and creative abilities play an important role when we travel. For this reason, after a trip, we will never be the same again. It is an intense and stimulating experience, and for this reason it can be very enjoyable.
When we travel, we improve as human beings
Traveling always exposes us to different enriching experiences. As the maxim says, "fascism is cured by reading and racism by traveling". A trip, in fact, frees us from many prejudices, especially if we visit a place where we have to immerse ourselves in a culture different from the one in which we were born or which can be in strong contrast with our usual reality.
Thus we understand that the difference must not be looked at vertically, but horizontally: no culture is higher or lower than the others, they are all on the same level. They are simply different.
People who take a vacation at least twice a year have also been shown to have a lower risk of suffering from depression. In fact, traveling is a powerful antidote to sadness, because in one way or another it forces us to think and see everything from a different perspective. It is like a bathroom of renewal, which allows us to renew the way we look at the world around us and ourselves.
Traveling also helps us to get in touch with ourselves and with our most genuine feelings. Far from our usual environment, it is easier for ideas or emotions to emerge that we usually try to put in the background, precisely because of the context that surrounds us. We can finally see ourselves in a different way, freeing ourselves from all the daily constraints and from all the factors that, at times, inhibit us.
It is one thing to look at life through the glass of everyday stress; another, very different, is to observe it during one of those brackets granted by the trip. For this reason, we can say that traveling makes us better people. It renews us, gives us new energy and fills our life with color and magic. There is no doubt: traveling will always take us somewhere!
