Traveling Makes You a Better Person and More Creative
Traveling is a way to break with the usual and enjoy a feeling of wellbeing that comes from exploring, discovery and surprise. Before, to travel somewhere far meant changing your life. It could last months or even years, due to the large amount of time invested in the journey. Now, things are different. In fact, you can travel anywhere in the world in less than two days, and if you are lucky with the connections you can make it in less than one.
By traveling you change your perspective and you feel renewed. It is an invitation to get out of your routine and give parts of yourself that may be dormant due to repetition and habit the opportunity to flourish. You face new challenges that will ask you for abilities that are different from those you normally use.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
-Mark Twain
Travel will immerse you into situations that will be less predictable, because in these new environments there are many unknowns. That uncertainty can be a source of anxiety, but even more of excitement and a feeling of adventure. Born travelers need that adrenalin; sporadic travelers know that those emotions remind them of how good it is to be alive.
When you travel, you get out of your comfort zone. You allow yourself to broaden the horizons of your world and your life. But the best thing is that, sometimes, without even knowing it, you stimulate your intellectual capacity, this makes you more creative and helps to develop your social and emotional abilities.
Travel is sparks creativity
They say you enjoy a trip three times: when you plan it, when you take it and when you remember it. All three stages require a great amount of creativity from you. It is required from the moment you decide where you are going to travel. You have to be conscious of what you like, what you are looking for and what each destination can offer you.
When you take a trip, one way or another, your creativity should appear on the scene. You go to unfamiliar places, or at least to places that are not normal for you. You find yourself having to adapt in many ways: to the practices and customs, the food, the routines, how to get around, etc. Furthermore, if the trip is far you also have to adapt to other ways of social interaction and a different language.
As you remember your trip, you will choose the best way to organize those memories and give them meaning. You relive them, you associate with and choose the most relevant aspects of your experience. You interpret what you lived.
All these processes, if looked at together, are tantamount to complex intellectual activities. Almost like writing a book. Almost like drawing, evaluate and carry out a project. A lot of your intellectual and creative abilities are involved in traveling. For these reasons, after you take a trip, you are never the same. The experience is extremely intense and stimulating, and that is precisely why it can be so enjoyable.
Traveling makes you a better person
Traveling exposes you to enriching experiences. As the saying goes, “Fascism is overcome by reading and intolerance by traveling.” A journey will free you from many prejudices, especially if you go to a place where you have to immerse yourself into a culture that is different from your own, or one where that is a great contrast from your everyday routine. You have to understand that the differences cannot be viewed vertically, but rather horizontally: no culture is worse or better, just different.
It has also been proven that people who take vacation at least twice per year, are at a lower risk of depression. In fact, traveling is a great antidote to sadness, because one way or another it makes you see everything differently. It is like a rejuvenating bath that allows you to refresh your perspective of reality and of yourself.
Traveling also helps you get in touch with yourself and with your innermost feelings. Freed from your normal environment, it is easier for those ideas and emotions that you normally keep in the background to emerge, by the same background influence. In a way, you can see yourself freed from all the daily excuses and all the factors that tend to inhibit you.
It’s one thing to view life through the lens of stressful daily life, and quite a different thing to view it during a hiatus that a trip allows. That is why traveling makes you a better person. It renews you, gives you vigor and makes it possible to fill your life with color and magic. Never doubt that traveling will always take you somewhere.