How traveling can heal us

Traveling is one of the most transformational things we can do. What makes it so magical?

Travel is a nebulous term. What counts as travel? How far do we have to journey from our home to reap the benefits? How long must we be gone?

Woman standing outside in nature

It’s difficult to talk about travel at all without acknowledging its barriers and risks. On the surface, travel is expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive. It isn’t always easy or accessible.

But when we can manage to snake away a little time and money for it, travel can transform us — no matter how far we go. But what, exactly, does it do to us? How does time away from our home base come to have such an effect on us?

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A world outside our own

Well, there’s the obvious answer. Travel exposes us to another way of living, perhaps another culture if we go far enough. Living somewhere else for a few hours or days or weeks shows us that our way is not the only way to go through life. We might never eat seafood in our landlocked hometown, but when we go to the coast, we can’t seem to escape it.

At first, it’s strange to witness this profound dissonance between our daily life and someone else’s. How do we share the same world, inhabit the same bodies? It all seems too much, the culture shock too overwhelming.

But after we sit with this discord for a little while, we realize that only thin, artificial veneers separate our lives from theirs. We might speak a different language, but we all speak. We might eat different food, but we all eat.

This summer, I was serendipitously in Porto, Portugal during their festival of St. John. I’d never seen anything quite like the eruption of life in streets across the city. They have a tradition of bonking the head of everyone they pass with a squeaky, plastic hammer. At first, this seemed so odd, so foreign. Would Americans ever stand such a personally invasive tradition?

And then, I relaxed into the playfulness of it. No language was needed, no elaborate explanation of St. John or Catholicism. Only bonks and squeaks and smiles. Tourists and locals alike, all in the streets to celebrate a long-dead saint. It was a moment of belonging in a place we didn’t quite belong.

But isn’t that what traveling is? Stumbling around, looking for a moment of connection in a foreign place. Unburdened by all our belongings and our identities at home, we’re free to be just another soul in the street, hitting another with a plastic hammer.

The art of traveling reminds us that we’re only one small point on this earth and in history — connected to the much larger human project. When you stand in one of Europe’s grand cathedrals or beside the pyramids in Egypt or the Statue of Liberty in New York, it’s impossible not to feel this connection to the tapestry of human life that’s come before us, even if much of it is a messy, brutal history we would rather turn away from.

In this way, travel forces us to confront the messy parts, to recognize that we all share this world and the history that sculpted it. And, in my opinion, it’s this reminder of the shared nature of our past, present, and future that will heal us — it softens our isolation in the present, scary moment.

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Traveling in place

As I said before, though, travel is often inconvenient, if not impossible. Fortunately, all is not lost. There is plenty we can do here, in our hometowns, with the people we find beside us.

• Start learning a language. I’ve had luck with Duolingo, but it’s not the only way. Language is a portal into another culture’s mind. How do they structure their sentences? Do they have words that don’t translate well to your native language? Ever since I learned that the French version of “I miss you” translates literally to “You are missing from me,” I’ve longed to convey that same depth of emotion in English.

• Or, find a local organization that services an international population. Odds are, other cultures have already found their way to you. Seek them out; hear their stories. From the exposure, you’ll hear what it’s like to be somewhere else in the world, to straddle multiple cultures and somehow synthesize them into one.

To me, travel is a state of mind — and it doesn’t always require putting our feet on a new patch of ground. It can simply be a venturing past the comfortable and familiar into something new, or the recognition that we’re just visitors here and everywhere, carrying all we have on our backs and in our arms.

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