To Travel is to Change

A friend of mine once asked me how often the feelings of relaxation and happiness stayed with me after a vacation. Now, research has found that travelers may not experience feelings of happiness for long after a vacation.

Like every other life experience, though, I believe that travel can be mundane, or it can be life-defining. I’ve spent moments traveling where I couldn’t wait to be home. There have also been moments traveling which have changed the way I look at life. Not all travel is good, and not all that is good can only be found in travel.

Having just come back from a work & play trip in Queenstown, New Zealand, I realized that maybe the point of traveling isn’t always about relaxation or happiness. Perhaps the point of traveling is in expanding your mind, to open up your worldview to include new vistas and cultures.

To see things you have not seen, to consider viewpoints you may not have considered, to smell and breathe in a place entirely alien to the world you’ve known till that moment. To help you see the world differently, even if by only a little bit.

Before I’d gone to Queenstown, I would never have been able to imagine that such a breathtaking place could exist. Sure, I’ve seen the landscapes shot on TV and in the movies, but that’s never the same as being there yourself. I constantly found myself thinking there that if heaven really exists, it’d surely look like New Zealand. My world is bigger now.