Travelling brings along few of the best memories of life. Sometime they also get you a friend, often lifelong type, to fill more colors in your canvas of life.
When you reflect back on your trip to Ladakh last summer, the best memories might not come from how amazing the Lake looked under the sun but how surreal you felt in sharing stories of your life to that fellow traveller you had just met, with surreal lake for company.
Travelling is more than admiring landscape and monitoring monument. It’s also about creating and sharing memories with people completely unknown. Surprising as it might, opening out to a strangers is a lot easier than with those already in your circle. No baggage of past, devoid of fear of future repercussion, and the positive feeling that nothing is at stake even if it doesn’t turn out as hoped make the adventure worth it. Even more so if you are travelling solo.
Might make friends for life:
Once on a train ride home, my shoes go stolen leaving me annoyed, embarrassed and stuck to my berth. And the fact that half the journey was still left, left me miserable and wondering how to move around when the needs come. When people are vulnerable and can’t do anything about that, they seek refuge in abuse. I was no different. However it was to make no difference to the reality I was stuck in.
What really made the difference was this gentleman on the berth right below who offered me his slipper.
My faith in humanity was restored.
Numbers exchanged, Food shared, and 4-hours of exciting conversation with him ensured something bigger.
It was the beginning of a durable association that continues till now some 8 years after the incidence.
Might get a new perspective on life
When you push yourself out of the comfort zone and stretch your arms for a new friendship, you not only open door to new horizon of experience but also learn few lesson of life and the world yourself. You learn to see life from other’s perspective and gain a better insight on your strength and weakness.
Makes you learn about a new culture and the World: It took me a trip down south to know that South Indians are not as violent as portrayed by their movies shown on TV. That woman here is relatively safer and given more respect than what is perceived in Hindi heartland. That people from Arunachal speak fluent Hindi and are as patriotic as rest of us despite being racially discriminated.
Travelling open you to people and culture different than your own and thus helping you learn and unlearn a lot about them. It teaches you more than a book can ever do.
Makes you a better Judge of people
Anyone can play it safe and keep to himself over the course of journey, really easy and utterly boring. But when you decide to go out of your comfort zone and reach out to strangers, willing to discover what they are like, you gain some valuable insight into their personality and of your own. With experience, and a bit of trial and error, you soon learn the art of picking up the right people to have a good time with. And with friends by your side, you gain confidence and help necessary to handle tricky situations.
Turns you into a storyteller:
Remember how the moments spent on the beach with that pretty girl still give you goose bumps and your friends can’t get enough of the enchanting blow by blow account of that OR how the heart-wrenching story of that 8 year old boy – who works at a tea stall to bring up his 3 younger sisters after his mother was run over by a car – moved your colleagues to tears. And now you all donate a part of your salary every month to an NGO that’s making a difference in the lives of such orphans.
Travelling exposes you to people and places; good and bad, each in turn giving you a valuable lesson and experience that enrich your life.
Sometimes we need strangers to teach us life. It took me a tea-stall boy to make me appreciative of things – we otherwise take for granted – like having a loving family who look out for you. We can learn patience and perseverance from Sumit (I met on a train ride) who cracked UPSC in his last attempt despite relentless pressure from family to look for other less-competitive career choices as time was running out. There are a lot of inspirational stories out there waiting to be told; to inspire you not to quit and go on till you succeed, to make you surer of yourself and accepting of diverse opinions, to give you a new and fresh perspective on life, to change you for the better.
