Five Ways to Travel Deeper
To travel deeper is to travel consciously within a culture. It can be your own local culture or another culture. What makes it deeper is your presence as an active and conscious being participating within it.
Listen and observe. Rather than centralizing your own worldview, listen and observe what people do where you are. Perhaps the loud noises coming from the loudspeakers that distressed you are meant to share one's enjoyment of music with you.
When you allow yourself to be open-minded and to absorb the positive energy in your new environment, our experience can become more saturated with color and excitement.
Be you in a new culture. You know your likes and dislikes at home. Perhaps you are shy, perhaps you do not like fish. In a new culture, you have the opportunity to discover new things about yourself. Perhaps in a second language, you are confident and social. Perhaps your taste buds can change and grow just like yourself.
I have personally experienced great changes in both examples because I choose to learn about a new me in a different culture.
Learn to fail. Have you taken Spanish in school, and still can’t pronounce birria? Travel deeper by allowing yourself to fail. Athletes call this practice. Practice or the act of repetition and failure can help you grow and improve. Give yourself a luxurious life by failing.
Say Hi. One thing I have come to know to be true is how helpful and kind people are. It is easy to allow the news and media we consume to make us lose faith in humanity, but whether I was lost in the Sahara, lonely in Paris, or hitch-hiking in the Caribbean, I have always found hope in the kindness of humanity.
Traveling can be wild, and I have the stories to prove it, let me help you make your travel easier, safer, and more authentic.
Choose joy over negativity. Some say excitement and anxiety are the same emotion. Traveling somewhere new can be an anxious thing. There are so many unknown variables.
At that moment, take a deep breath and remind yourself that you are excited. That you choose joy. There is not a one trick fits all solution to avoid negativity, but we can try our best to choose joy and to allow ourselves that luxury to be present at the moment.
Next time you travel, ask yourself are you living or are you on auto-pilot. Vacation should not be about losing yourself, but about being yourself.
