This question has puzzled me for the last few months. And I had a lot of time to think about it because I was traveling my self. South America was the destination; I and my mate would explore Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Each country for one month.
The answer to my question started to unveil itself after a few weeks of traveling. I noticed that there was a fundamental difference in the way I experienced the journey and the way my friend did. While my friend was always planning on what to see next, I was pondering about my life in Holland. Not that I didn’t enjoy what I was seeing and doing, it just occurred to me that our motivations for making this journey where totally different. And then it hit me. There are two types of travelers, those that travel to get somewhere and those that travel to get away from something.
I consider myself to be among the latter. So then I asked myself, what did I want to get away form? I found it to be my life in Amsterdam. Not that I was an unhappy chap, I have a great place to live and loads of friends. It was just that I didn’t know how which way to go with it all. And maybe that was what I was looking for, the right direction for my life.
And in some ways traveling helped me with finding a direction, in others it didn’t. One of the unique aspects of being so far away from home is that you get a bird-eye perspective on your life. You’re able to look down at who you used to be and judge about what you liked and disliked. That way I found out about some things I wanted to change and it also made me realize that my life wasn’t so bad at all.
But on the other hand, how much can you find out about the directions you should be going in your life, when you are in a place that bears so little resemblance to it? The experiences I have had are so different from my day to day life that they did not help me in any way to find out what to do with my life. I am not saying it was a worthless undertaking, because it did open my eyes about a lot of things. But they didn’t help me with what I really felt was lacking, a clear goal in my life.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you want to travel, be conscious about the reasons you have for going. And be realistic about what you can expect to find in a place so different from home. I have had some beautiful and impressive experiences, and I am glad I got to see so much of the world. But my travels didn’t get me any closer to where I want to be, if anything, maybe even a little bit further…
This is part one in a three-part contribution for OiaB by Marc Bohlken. The photo is real - High Res - Copyright Marc Bohlken.
