"Wanderlust"

"The urge for adventure, the desire to know what is over the next hill are like echoes in the backs of our minds that speak of sounds not quite heard and places not quite seen.

Take the chances and follow the voices that call you to distant places. Live, if only for a short time, the life of a traveler. It is a life you will always cherish and never forget. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity, but as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in space and time. You will return a different person.

Many people don't want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people's lives while never really leaving their own. They try to bring their own world with them wherever they go, or try to re-create the world they left. They do not want to risk the security of their understanding and see how small and limited their experiences really are. They move from hotel to hotel, protected by money and credit cards, and never really meet the world through which they are traveling.

To be a real traveler you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the center of your universe. You must believe totally in the lives of the people and the places where you find yourself.

Become part of the fabric of their everyday lives and you will get a sense of what it means to live in their worlds. Give yourself over them - embrace them rather than judge them - and you will find that the beauty in their lives and their world will become part of yours.

When you move on, you will have grown. You will realize that the possibilities of life in this world are endless, and that beneath our differences of languages and culture we all share the dream of loving and being loved, of having a life with more joy than sorrow.
You will never regret your choice.

To be sure, there will be moments of doubt when you stand alone on an empty road in an icy rain, or when you are ill with the fever in a rented bed. But as the pains of the moment will come, so too will they fall away.

And when you get old, and your body has begun to fail you, the memories will be waiting for you. They will lift you and carry you over mountains and oceans. You will hold them and turn them and watch them catch the sunlight as they come alive once more in your imagination, You will be rich and you will be at peace.

In the end, you will be so much richer, so much stronger, so much clearer, so much happier, and so much better a person that all risk and hardship will seem like nothing compared to the knowledge and wisdom you have gained."
 

-A man who so eloquently said everything I perceive to be true about travel... Kent Nerburn.