Enter Rolf:
Last fall I spoke at the excellent
DO Lectures, which brings innovative thinkers from around the world for a
series of talks in rural Wales. My talk, which is
available in full via the video link above encourages people to make themselves
rich in time and to become active in making their travel dreams happen.
The talk itself contains essential
advice and inspiration regarding travel — but what struck me on re-watching it
was an improvised moment at the beginning of the talk, when I pointed out how
“these aren’t really travel-specific challenges — these are things that can
apply to life in general. Think of travel as a metaphor for how you live your
life at home.”
Indeed, travel has a way of slowing
you down, of waking you up, of pulling you up out of your daily routines and
seeing life in a new way. This new way of looking at the world need not end
when you resume your life at home.
Here are 5 key ways in which the
lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you
return home…
1) Time = Wealth
By far the most important lesson
travel teaches you is that your time is all you really own in life. And the
more you travel, the more you realize that your most extravagant possessions
can’t match the satisfaction you get from finding new experiences, meeting new
people, and learning new things about yourself. “Value” is a word we often hear
in day-to-day life, but travel has a way of teaching us that value is not
pegged to a cash amount, that the best experiences in life can be had for the
price of showing up (be it to a festival in Rajasthan, a village in the Italian
countryside, or a sunrise ten minutes from your home).
Scientific studies have shown that
new experiences (and the memories they produce) are more likely to produce long-term
happiness than new things. Since new experiences aren’t exclusive to travel,
consider ways to become time-rich at home. Spend less time working on things
you don’t enjoy and buying things you don’t need; spend more time embracing the
kinds of activities (learning new skills, meeting new people, spending time
with friends and family) that make you feel alive and part of the world.
2) Be Where You Are
A great thing about travel is that
it forces you into the moment. When you’re celebrating carnival in Rio, riding
a horse on the Mongolian steppe, or exploring a souk in Damascus, there’s a
giddy thrill in being exactly where you are and allowing things to happen. In
an age when electronic communications enable us to be permanently connected to
(and distracted by) the virtual world, there’s a narcotic thrill in throwing
yourself into a single place, a single moment. Would you want to check your
bank-account statement while exploring Machu Picchu in Peru? Are you going to
interrupt an experience of the Russian White Nights in St. Petersburg to check
your Facebook feed? Of course not — when you travel, you get to embrace the
privilege of witnessing life as it happens before your eyes. This attitude need
not be confined to travel.
At home, how often do you really
need to check your email or your Twitter feed? When you get online, are you
there for a reason, or are you simply killing time? For all the pleasures and
entertainments of the virtual-electronic world, there is no substitute for
real-life conversation and connection, for getting ideas and entertainment from
the people and places around you. Even at home, there are sublime rewards to be
had for unplugging from online distractions and embracing the world before your
eyes.
3) Slow Down
One of the advantages of long-term
travel (as opposed to a short vacation) is that it allows you to slow down and
let things happen. Freed from tight itineraries, you begin to see the kinds of
things (and meet the kinds of people) that most tourists overlook in their
haste to tick attractions off a list. A host of multi-million-dollar
enterprises have been created to cater to our concept of “leisure,” both at
home and on the road — but all too often this definition of leisure is as
rushed and rigidly confined as our work life. Which is more emblematic of
leisure — a three-hour spa session in an Ubud hotel, or the freedom to wander
Bali at will for a month?
All too often, life at home is
predicated on an irrational compulsion for speed — we rush to work, we rush
through meals, we “multi-task” when we’re hanging out with friends. This might
make our lives feel more streamlined in a certain abstracted sense, but it
doesn’t make our lives happier or more fulfilling. Unless you learn to pace and
savor your daily experiences (even your work-commutes and your noontime meals)
you’ll cheating your days out of small moments of leisure, discovery and joy.
4) Keep it Simple
Travel naturally lends itself to
simplicity, since it forces you to reduce your day-to-day possessions to a few
select items that fit in your suitcase or backpack. Moreover, since it’s
difficult to accumulate new things as you travel, you to tend to accumulate new
experiences and friendships instead — and these affect your life in ways mere
“things” cannot.
At home, abiding by the principles
of simplicity can help you live in a more deliberate and time-rich way. How
much of what you own really improves the quality of your life? Are you buying
new things out of necessity or compulsion? Do the things you own enable you to
live more vividly, or do they merely clutter up your life? Again, researchers have determined that new experiences satisfy our higher-order needs in a way
that new possessions cannot — that taking a friend to dinner, for example,
brings more lasting happiness than spending that money on a new shirt. In this
way, investing less in new objects and more in new activities can make your
home-life happier. This less materialistic state of mind will also help you
save money for your next journey.
5) Don’t Set Limits
Travel has a way revealing that much
of what you’ve heard about the world is wrong. Your family or friends will tell
you that traveling to Colombia or Lebanon is a death-wish — and then you’ll go
to those places and have your mind blown by friendliness, beauty and new ways
of looking at human interaction. Even on a day-to-day level, travel enables you
to avoid setting limits on what you can and can’t do. On the road, you
naturally “play games” with your day: watching, waiting, listening; allowing
things to happen. There’s no better opportunity to break old habits, face
latent fears, and test out repressed facets of your personality.
That said, there’s no reason why you
should confine that sort of freedom to life on the road. The same
Fear-Industrial Complex that spooks people out of traveling can discourage you
from trying new things or meeting new people in own your hometown. Overcoming
your fears and escaping your dull routines can deepen your home-life — and the
open-to-anything confidence that accompanies travel can be utilized to test new
concepts in a business setting, rejuvenate relationships with friends and
family, or simply ask that woman with the nice smile if she wants to go out for
coffee. In refusing to set limits for what is possible on a given day, you open
yourself up to an entire new world of possibility.
Naturally, this list is just a
sampling of how travel can transform your non-travel life. What have I missed?
What has travel taught you about how to live life at home?
Posts
This is an outstanding post. I try to live my life this way. Unfortunately, however, I see too many people trapped in the mode of goods-and-status-accumulation, as opposed to experience-accumulation. Do we blame society for this? It can be very difficult for people to break out of patterns, especially when their behaviour results from years of parental pressures to be a "good middle-class citizen": get a high-paying job, buy a house (and a mortgage), have children, rinse, repeat...
ReplyDeleteI think it is wonderful that you've focussed on the fact that you don't have to be travelling to behave like a traveller. I wonder if people who have never had the impetus or good-fortune to do an extended travel stint will fully understand these principles? But it is really refreshing to see the ideas outlined here for people to think about.
Interesting ideas. I've been reflecting on how to fight a daily routine once you are back home from a long journey. The core, I believe, is in dealing with small tasks that, if not done at once, start to clutter and add to your inner feeling of being busy.
ReplyDeleteAnother observation is about how rich and fulfilling is the Life around us. Once trekking through the amazonian forest, I found it so easy to tune to the nature's rhythm of sunrises and sunsets. There was an abundance of experiences to awaken and tickle all our senses! Back home though one needs to make a conscious effort to reduce an intake of man-made stimuli or rather keep them to a selected few.