Dreaming of Travel!

Travel,

At times it seems a luxury that most people cannot afford as we want to. On the other hand, though it is one that many more people believe isn’t really necessary if you may already live in a place that you enjoy. The question then becomes why do I feel the need to go anywhere else when where I am is perfect? I lived a lot of my life within a neighborhood where the thought of traveling outside of the state was a major life-changing decision but, I always felt like something else was out there. It was almost like a limitation mentality for progression and expansion. The idea of seeing other places and meeting different people and new cultures did not exist. The progression to such a motivation was difficult to understand because I would ask myself, "How do you go from a tiny house on a little city block in a barely medium sized metropolis to relaxing on a beach in a country that takes a 16 hours ride by plane to get to? Where do I begin? After some time of asking I began to become determined to figure it all out. Creating nothing to create something as it were. Traveling is something that I believe everyone should experience in your lifetime whether you do it just once or, you make a habit out of going further and further to places that you may have never even heard of before. An issue with growing up within the American society today is that it fosters a mindset within its citizens a lack of need to understand or explore other cultures. We do not see value in speaking other languages even though so many are spoken around us. For the most part, we get very frustrated with people of other cultures much easier because of our difficulty in understanding someone's behavioral norms, speaking ability or even their cultural attire. At times we take more time to mock it than to try to understand why it is from their perspective. Now, I am not saying go out of your way everyday to learn another language to bridge the cultural divide of every group of people in this world if that is not something that you want to do but, imagine going to a place where most of the people that live there speak a language that is vastly different from your own. Where you become the outsider with the strange behavioral norms, speaking ability and yes, even strange cultural attire. You can begin to understand just how important it is to learn about other cultures and their way of living life to best interact with and learn from them because you either attempt to or you lose out on all of the amazing things that just learning a few words or cultural behaviors could open up for you from being an open-minded individual. In conclusion, I want most with this piece, to get across to you readers out there some points as to why I believe you should travel more often but, I do not want you to simply go somewhere, walk around and take a couple of pictures by some famous landmarks. Absorb the culture, talk to the people, learn a few words of the language. I know without a doubt that you will come back from such a trip with a very different perspective on other cultures. First, you have to find the passion behind wanting to travel for yourself and jump into it the first chance you get! You may even get a bite from the travel bug along the way.