Why Do We Travel?

I am lucky to have taken some incredible trips, including a recent one to “the end of the earth”: the island of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost point of South America. In a week, we traveled by boat and drove over 20 hours, seeing glaciers, beavers, a spotted seal, and passed two vehicles and two fishing boats. We saw more penguins than people.

King Penguin Colony.

Source: N.K.Napier

One night, the dinner conversation turned to “why we travel.” Some of the others said, “because the world is a huge place and I want to see as much as I can; to learn; to feel alive.”

All good answers but one response struck me: “When you travel, you take what you learn—the values, the ways people interact—and, sometimes without even realizing it, you build it into your own behavior.”

And that got me thinking: what behaviors or ways of thinking have I brought back and incorporated into the way I interact with others? I started a list and was surprised to find I have built in more small changes over the years than I’d expected. I’ll offer a few. Of course, they seem obvious now, but at the time I learned them, they weren’t.

Same language, different thinking

During college, I spent a year in Germany. I had studied German for about 15 months before I went so my language skills were not the greatest. Heck, they were awful, but I knew the only way to get better was to talk and listen and learn. So I did.

One day, a German friend and I were talking about socialism, democracy, and ideas about access to public (or private) land. We used the same German words but after a bit I realized we were defining them in very different ways, because of our basic values and beliefs about what the state or country should provide for citizens. Boom. I understood the words, but not his deeper thinking. I try now to figure out what someone is really saying, even if I understand the words.

Nurturing friendship

Years later, visiting family in Germany, a cousin’s husband asked how I “nurture friendships.” I was shocked: first, a man asked a question that I would have expected from a woman (my bias, I’ll admit) and second, the German word he used was a term for nurturing plants, but I’d never thought about it in the context of friendship. Obvious, once he said it. I began thinking more intentionally about how to nurture friendships as a result. Small conversation, big change.

All plants—and friendships—need nurturing.

Source: N.K.Napier

Mourning in different ways

I was a young adult when my mother died and it shook me when a person said, “It’s been two weeks, you should be over it by now.” When I was feeling bad months and years later, I assumed something was “wrong” with me.

But I have worked in Vietnam for years and appreciate the way people there handle mourning: three days of funeral activities, the family and friends come together on the 49th and 100th days after a death, and then meet yearly on the anniversary of the death. The process acknowledges that mourning takes time, that people want to come together and be sad and, eventually, that they can use the gathering just be together.

Now, I make a note to myself when I hear that a friend has lost someone to death. Then, about seven weeks later, I write a note. I tell them about Vietnam’s approach and that I’m thinking about them. I’ve been astounded how many people have said later that at that moment, they were especially down, that acknowledgement of sadness helped.

So next time you travel, think about why. What is it that you absorb, perhaps without even knowing at the time, and bring into your life?

In the meantime, to offset my own carbon footprint, I try to support causes in some of the countries I visit. It’s a small contribution to the places that have changed me so much.

Tierra del Fuego.

Source: N.K. Napier