How Travel Has Changed Me

I am taking a wonderful online class through the TravelinOma blog. Every day we have an assignment and here is mine for Week 1, Day 2. I am scared to ask for suggestions, but maybe let me know if one of my paragraphs or sentences is unclear or if I could structure it differently to make my points more effectively. I am trying to grow. I would also love positive comments (wouldn’t we all?) to encourage me in this endeavor if you find anything you particularly like.

How travel has changed me.

I believe that who you are is made up of all of the experiences you have had and your reactions to those experiences. Thus, who I am is at least partially a result of all the travelling I have done. But I think that the traveling experiences I have had make up a disproportionate part of me because of the great and lasting impact they have had. When I try to sort all of the memories, discoveries, and reflections of my travel, and how they have changed me, they fell naturally into four categories: confidence, relating to others, compassion, and adding context to my life.

I have not always been terrifically self-confident, but travelling has done amazing things to build my confidence. When I was 13 years old I travelled to Mexico with a group from school and toured around the Yucatan Peninsula for a week visiting ancient Mayan ruins and paying homage to other culturally important sites. At the end of the week we were in Cancun and we were given freedom to spend the last two or three days however we liked. My natural tendency was to do the “safe” thing and stay on the beach and read all day, but I felt empowered by the previous week and reached far out of my comfort zone to do things I never thought I could do at the age of 13. I, knowing very little Spanish, communicated with a non-English speaking local to figure out the public transportation system and rode the bus with some fellow students to a small, off the tourist path, village market some distance away and spent the morning bartering in broken Spanish to acquire some souvenirs to bring home with me. (As a side note, I still have a beautiful onyx chess set that I bought that day.) The rest of the free days were spent in similarly uncharacteristic activities for me and it felt glorious. I felt as though I had a secret when I came home – the secret was that I was capable of more than I had dreamed and capable of more than others expected of me. This confidence, and the confidence gained in my years of travelling since, has affected not only those subsequent travels, but also the rest of my life as I have learned that I am capable of more than I thought in many other arenas besides travel.

One goal that I continually strive toward achieving is to gain enough knowledge about enough different things that I can comfortably converse with anyone I come into contact with about things that are important to them. Even if I only know enough to ask questions about a topic to open them up, that is helpful. Travelling has exposed me to many kinds of people, political ideas, historical references, and the list could go on and on. This allows me to have a basis with which to make connections with others. A few weeks ago I was visiting with a recently widowed woman who lives in my neighborhood and I noticed that she was wearing a shirt that had Hebrew writing on it. I asked her about it and mentioned that I had been to Israel on a study abroad several years ago and she opened up and told me all about how her husband had taken her there a few years ago since it had always been a dream of hers to visit the Holy Land. I was so glad that I had enough experiences through that study abroad to talk with her about a memory so valuable to her and for her to know how important it was to me as well. It can be very rewarding to see how meaningful it is to others to have someone relate to them and have common ground on which to begin building a relationship.

Meeting people of different cultures and ideas, no matter where I am in the world, increases my compassion, love, and understanding of the other children of God on this earth. When I started to see that most people live quietly, doing the best they can with what they have, my love for those around me increased and I was more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if I was tempted to judge. When I watch the news (which admittedly is pretty seldom), I see faces of people and not just a news story. I have seen those who have suffered on both sides of a conflict and it makes the solution not so black and white. I pray for those whose story hasn’t been told and who are suffering and trying to survive. I hope that in the years to come I will continue to feel a greater compassion for all those with whom I come in contact and that I will always remain grateful for the lessons that they teach me.

As an educator, I feel that we all learn best when we are able to make connections between the new things that we are learning and the knowledge and understanding that we have already gained. The more knowledge and understanding that we have, the easier it is to make connections to what we are trying to learn and the easier it is to retain the new knowledge we are gaining. This is giving a context to the new things we learn. Travel has helped me develop a much more extensive context with which to understand the new experiences that I have every day. To be able to connect my new experiences with the things I have learned through my travels, I am able to remember and retain more of the things I have a chance to glean from life on a daily basis.

Travelling is one of my favorite things to do. However, this is largely the case because of how it changes my life in small and meaningful ways and not because of the big glamorous buildings I see or the fabulous beaches I swim on. I hope it may continue to shape who I am in the years to come.