One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things - –- Henry Miller

We all should live the life of a traveler, even if for a short while. From ancient times, it has always been a man’s desire to find out what is over the next hill, and that very same feeling has never deserted anyone of us, but the fear of leaving the comfort of the familiar is what that prevents those of us from not exploring. At the mention of a place, no matter where we are, a mental picture appears in our mind describing the place. The picture is defined by what we have seen if we have already been there. For most places, where we would not have seen it ourselves, the picture is defined by what we have studied, heard or read and sometimes its funny to see how far from truth that picture is.

The magic of travel is that you leave your own home secure in your own knowledge and identity but once you are off and the world in all its richness and surprises intervenes. We meet people that we cannot invent, see scenes that we cannot imagine, life that no education can show, and experience cultures that we cannot define. As we open ourselves to the world totally different to our own, we can realize that our own life which was so large to consume our life thus far is actually such a small dot in space and time and we will become a different person, for the better.

It’s a pity when some of us don’t want to be travelers but be tourists. Tourists just pass through the surface of other’s people lives without actually leaving their own, most often, rather sadly and painfully try to bring their world with them wherever they go or when desperate will try and recreate the world that they left. Tourist will never risk the security of their own understanding and never realize how small and limited their experiences really are. True travelers become the fabric of the local’s everyday lives, embrace them without judging them.

While we should acknowledge the curse of travel - that we may end up being runners, running away from our lives, its twists of fate, our problems and complications and thus ending up complicating the lives of people around and us and punishing them by abandoning them at their time of need, I personally believe that when tragedies or great changes in life occurs, if we are well traveled, we will understand that there are million ways to live and we will be able to move to new and worthy things.

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." -- St. Augustine