An Ode To Traveling

Be Here.

Someone once told me: "Adhi you travel a lot!"

I stopped for a while thinking, well... If once a year is considered a lot, thank you very much! It's true, I only travel once a year. And it's been a life resolution of mine since 2012 that I want to go somewhere new (and hopefully far) once a year. And I'm okay with it. I don't have to travel a lot every year. Once a year is enough to make me happy. Also PS: I don't count going back to Singapore as traveling.

I've made it a goal of mine, and a yearly resolution to travel somewhere new since 2012. It was during my trip with SP to Inner Mongolia and Mt Kinabalu that I realised wow, I've been missing a lot of great places in this world! And thus I'm determined to travel somewhere new every year. Especially when I'm young. I have the energy and (sort of) the time and money. Not sure how life will be in the future.

I call this personal project of mine "Project Wanderlust" (lets shorten it to PW). PW2012 was the east coast of USA, PW2013 was Bali (I've been here before but that was like 12 years back?), PW2014 was Iceland, PW2015 was Australia and my latest Project Wanderlust was Tibet this year. Right now, I have no idea and no plan of what PW2017 is going to be haha. Anyway I'm going to talk about my PW on a separate post. After all it's been 5 years since I started this project. Time flies really.

You know how much I love traveling. I told myself that I want to see as many places on this planet as possible. I want this body to see the great sights, to taste the great (vegetarian) food, to hear the sounds and to feel the surrounding. Across the years however, my perception of travel kinda change.

Back in 2013, I used to feel jealous and envious of people and friends when I see their travel photos. Maybe I read too many articles about traveling, and maybe I watched too many travel shows and travel vlogs. I have this mindset that I have to travel. Traveling makes me happy. I have to go out and see the world. What am I doing here. I should be out there traveling and living my life. 

I live under the bubble that living life to the fullest equals to traveling as often as possible. Seeing the great sights of the world yada yada. My perception of travel changes after my trip to Iceland. I went to Iceland for a short 5 days. When I told my friends that I was only going for 5 days, everyone was telling me "You need to stay longer!". But actually it was due to my short time, that I made a full and best use of my time in that beautiful country. I went to the places I planned to see and I enjoyed my trip.

After I returned home, do I feel happy? Yes. Do I feel sad? Yes. Do I feel accomplished? Absolutely. Most importantly is that I came to a serendipitous realisation that you don't have to travel like once a month to live your life to the fullest HAHAHA. Okay what I mean is that yes you should travel around the world if you want to, but you don't have to rush everything. 

I used to tell myself that traveling around the world is a goal of mine. It still is, but I am now rephrasing the goal to "traveling to places I want to go to". I think the word "world" is way too ambitious and ambiguous to begin with. I'm sure you've heard stories of people who leave everything behind and travel around the world. Yes. You literally need that kind of ambition and dedication to travel around the world.

Good news is, you don't have to if you don't want to. So after my trip to Iceland, I deleted my bucket list and created a new one. I list down the places that I want to do to, from the top priority which I hope to tick-off first, to the least ones. And I told myself okay lets achieve your dream as much as you can, to the best ability you can. Living your life to the fullest is never a race.

So yes, if in 2013 I told myself that I have to travel around the world to be happy, or to at least give me happiness in life, in 2014 this whole mindset is gone. I would say my change in perspective is also due to my journey of discovering the art of happiness. I learned a lot throughout these two years.

I've learned that happiness is not something you search and chase for but it is something that you create. So I asked myself a question, if I rely on traveling to make me happy, do I have to stop being happy if I couldn't get the chance to travel? Obviously no. So basically I learned that if you can't be happy wherever you are now, what makes you think that you can be happy somewhere else?

Also nothing is permanent in life. Even the illusion that traveling will make me happy.

If there is anything that traveling teaches me, is that living in the moment feels so blissful. During our travel, life is teaching us to be in the moment. To savour every time that we have in this place we've never been (or have been) at. And if you do it during your travel, you should apply it to your daily life too. After all our time on this life is very limited. Be here, and enjoy every moment of it.

Now that I have a responsibility to bear, and life being life, I do realise that it's getting harder for me to travel. But my legs are always itching for an adventure, and I will seize every opportunity to travel. If I have it, I'll create it, and I'll enjoy the trip to the fullest. If I don't then it's alright, life always has plans for us. And most importantly, be in the moment.

All in all, I'm not saying that we should just give up traveling. Neither should we give in to the idea that traveling won't make us happy. I'd say let us all be happy wherever we are, and that there is no need of unhappiness when we can't travel. Go to as many places as you want to see and celebrate every moment you have over there. And even if you can't travel, let us celebrate every moment we have wherever we are. That, to me is the definition of living life to the fullest now.

I'd like to end this post with a favourite travel quote of mine. It says:

"We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us".