Why do we Crave Travel?

Book the flights, make the itinerary, plan the outfits. 

Pack your bag, drive to the airport. 

Bag check, security, rapidly download something because you forgot the flight is 14 hours. 

Get on the plane, Seatbelt sign, Airplane mode

You're gone.

Off you go to try new foods, learn new things and immerse yourself into a new culture. Where home is the same thing, day in, day out, being away means excitement, everything is new and shiny. For a few days, a week, a month real life is irrelevant and upon the trips end you get to make the ultimate keep sake. The Instagram post. And maybe that is the core reason we want to travel, to just get out.

But to me it is desirable and dare I say even quite beautiful that in traveling, you enforce and expose yourself to a standpoint that is often neglected, and are forced to come to the realization of your complete and total insignificance. 

Now, I don't mean to say that as individuals we are not important, but throughout my recent travels whilst I unknowingly set off up Hamstead's 320 step staircase after getting lost on the way to emirates stadium, walked the cobblestone streets of Paris, Rome and Florence in  completely inappropriate footwear, sweated like never before in Singaporean hawker centers, and somehow lived through the coldest cold I have ever felt in the streets of New York (despite feeling like the Michelin man in 20 thousand layers). The residents and locals of all these countries were not paying attention. Regardless of where I was, the Brits, Parisians, Italians, Americans and Singaporeans alike didn't pay any heed to my many incompetencies, or really to anything I was doing at all. 

I, with my beautiful mum, was moving in my own direction, chasing enrichment, culture and cuisine across oceans, continents and countries and in that movement I crossed paths with countless different people, every one of them seeking their own agenda. It seems ridiculous to have to unpack, I mean come on! We can all acknowledge and it is universally known, that each individual person has their own unique life, experience and goals. But it is a blessing found in travel, to remove ourselves from the mundane and routine of our lives and consciously aim to grow and learn within cultures that are not our own, embracing and yes, moving to your personal direction. But even when remaining still you are surrounded by hundreds of strangers moving in a hundred different directions. Insignificant and entirely Anonymous.

And how beautiful is that anonymity, the fact that each and every person you pass, is living their own rich and interesting life unaware of who you are, where you’ve traveled from, the mistakes you've made and bluntly, that they have no great concern for your existence. Maybe, with the exception of what I was doing when it came to suchhhh a profound realisation - people watching. 

Social media likes to refer to this sentiment as sonder, coined by John Koenig i describe the observation that everyone has a story to which they alone are the protagonist.  Where in our own lives we are the central character, but to everyone else we exist as an extra, filling in the background space of each scene, playing an unspeaking role. A negligible character to those in our home countries but even more so in our travels where the likelihood of seeing the same person twice feels almost like a million to one. 

Then, when we can travel, and can feel the inconsequential nature of our actions in a grander sense of the world, maybe that invokes a freedom beyond just escaping routine and "getting out". Instead travel gives us the freedom to be completely and genuinely ourselves. To take risks, whether that's to try to speak Italian after two months of duo Lingo, or go to the same boulangerie every day of your trip because the pastries are just that good, to go out in New York Citys biggest snow fall of 3 years  - again in the wrong shoes -  and completely stack it, because no stranger, and I mean not one, is more concerned about your language fluency, eating habits or your Bambi on ice legs - or snow in my case - than they are with their own lives. 

So maybe when it comes down to it we crave travel because everything is a win when our goal can simply be experience, and in the end, that experience is durable and valuable. I know that I want to do things that younger me dreamed of, and push myself to take risks so older me can be proud of her life. To be able to tell my future family and friends that I went to Paris and I wasn't scared to eat baguette and croissants, that I saw snow for the first time in New York at Christmas, but also that I’ve had to run through an airport with no shoes on so I would make my flight, Because I was young, and adventurous and nobody really cared and I doubt they still remember.