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The unfamiliarity of travel jolts you out of your familiar patterns. Who we are on the road is different from who we are at home. I don’t know if who we are on the road is closer to our real self than who we are at home
Awakening to the idea that you belong somewhere else is a recipe for wanderlust.
You shouldn’t live to work. There’s too much to see in the world. You must live your life.”
To me, life felt like it happened when you traveled. There you were an active participant. It was on the road that I felt most at ease, most alive, and, most importantly, happy.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. —H. JACKSON BROWN’S MOTHER
Learning to go with the flow is the most important part of travel planning. Travel is about letting things unfold and happen naturally. It’s better to see fewer attractions and go deeper into a city or a region than to cast a wide net and go shallow.
If you want serendipity to happen, you cannot expect it come, and you cannot make it occur, but you must always be ready for it.
Traveling solo, you learn who you are and what you are capable of. You learn how to be comfortable with only your own thoughts for companionship. In this sense, solo travel is a wonderful teacher, because it teaches self-reliance.
Of course, travel doesn’t let you escape your past. Your demons will always find some space in the bottom of your backpack. But travel does give you multiple fresh starts to deal with them, multiple ways of experimenting with the new self you want to become.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. —PICO IYER
you control your plans; don’t let your plans control you.
Travel itself is romantic—passionate, scary, risky, all at once
True happiness, and true wisdom, lies in embracing change as a fact—the fact—of life.
The real secret to life is that you get what you want when you do what you want. Life is what you make it, not what you wish it. Life is yours to create.
Adventure is a path. Real adventure—self-determined, self-motivated, often risky—forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind—and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you.
There is no old you. There is just the you that you are right now. You are always a work in progress. You are always ever changing. The world moves on, time passes, people come and go, and the future is always uncertain. As they say, that is life.
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
