Serendipitous Travel with Your Mind
How often do we find ourselves in an unfamiliar location without any room reserved, no one to fulfill us, and really little anticipation about the place where we’ve just landed? Nowadays, “not typically” is the most common response.
I’m starting to feel a growing number of that taking a trip without much of a strategy is becoming a rarified thing; that we are preparing and investigating ourselves into a blinkered experience every time we strike out to explore a brand-new place.
It takes a collective effort to travel without connectedness nowadays, to lose ourselves alone or otherwise in a totally new location and embrace unpredictability.
And that’s a damn embarassment.
How can we have significant interactions with individuals around the globe if we are on such a tight schedule? We have our transfers arranged, our hotel spaces reserved, and our activities looked into and planned out ahead of time. What is the point of travel if we’re too busy “maximizing a location” to actually experience it and totally engage with local people, who will inevitably make the adventure even more fascinating?
By knowing the very best and worst places to visit, consume, or stay in advance, aren’t we simply cornering ourselves into a boring experience that pulls the shutters down on all of those eye-opening, often harmful, thrilling, and engaging experiences, those gems that can never ever be predicted however are usually the most remarkable?
It isn’t just having access to endless travel blogs and forums and basic suggestions platforms online that’s the issue.
I think the reason we grab those websites in the very first place stems from a fairly current, misplaced yearning to avoid the uneasy sensation of being “out of place.” We believe that if we do enough reading and online research before we arrive, we can avoid this discomfort.
That “out of place” feeling is exactly what we should all be going for.
But if you’re heading out in search of an experience beyond relaxing on a beach for a week, that “out of place” feeling is exactly what we must all be going for. Feeling foreign in a new place can just increase every sense we have, and illicit an adventure rarely felt in our everyday lives. For once, we are forced to focus completely on the present.
Back prior to there was a huge selection of information on any provided town, beach, or backwater at the drop of a Google search, tourists would often have little to go on however a Lonely World guidebook and word of mouth. Real, this inevitably meant that everybody gravitated towards the same routes, towns, and areas –– but it likewise implied that we were exposed to a whole wealth of unknowns that are impossible today.
Our venues are now always looked into, evaluated, and planned beforehand.
Even when it pertains to the basic act of heading out to eat in a new location, which can typically be the ideal time to strike up a discussion with a stranger or attempt an unknown meal, we over-plan. Online guides have actually led us into an one-track mind variation of the world (ironically, online recommendations is often incorrect and far from the certainty we anticipate).
Thinking that whatever was “much better prior to the internet occurred” only goes to prove my age somewhat, however understanding less about a place till getting here was definitely less stressful. Going where the mood takes you is just more pleasurable than planning 10 sights to see, plus “should try” restaurants which one culturally substantial experience that everyone “has” to do.
I discover myself yearning with my rose-tinted specifications fully on for that time when we would set out, alone or otherwise, to just show up and let serendipity take over.
Whether it be a weekend in Paris or a month in India, the ‘stick a pin in a map and work it out when you get there’ way of traveling can leave us authentically open up to the absolute best and worst of the world. The entire set and caboodle.
Knowing a location through the lens of the web isn’t the very same as experiencing it.
It’s only when we let go of the evaluations and suggestions and benefits of a journey too securely planned that we get the opportunity to really exist –– to just live a location for a short while. That feeling ought to constantly be on the schedule.
