The reality of why we need to travel.

“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I still have to go, the more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough; to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” - Anthony Bourdain

You’re too old

You’re too young 

You’re too broke 

You don’t have the time

We might not have the money, the security or the stability but we sure have the excuse. There’s always the excuse. 

There’s always the promise that it will still be there tomorrow, the Louvre will stay open another year and Machu Picchu isn’t going anywhere. The reality is that although it’s unlikely that Saint Basils Cathedral will fall in the next 24 hours, its likely that with the continuous promise of tomorrow, most people will never see it. 

We grow up eager, eager to walk, run and speak. A flurry of knowledge surrounds us at all times in our youth, our first words are so often followed by full sentences and then the inability to stop speaking. The tapering off of mass stimuli as we age throws us into routine. Why would we need to look for anything more? We have everything at our finger tips now. 

Today you can sit in your living room and watch economies fall. You can scroll through a timeline and pick and choose which massacre you’d like to read about today. If you have a deep rooted prejudice, you need not fear, there’s some scary event happening across oceans that will help you justify it. 

Unfortunately even with all the technology in the world we can’t pick up the phone and feel the thunder of waves crashing off the shores near Cape Town. We can’t hike the tour du Mont Blanc through our laptops or look into the eyes of a fishmonger in the markets of Krong Kampot. 

With the amount of media access we have telling us everything about the world, some real and most dramatized, it’s more important than ever to gain our own knowledge. I cannot emphasize enough how necessary it is to throw our preconceptions and false ideas out of the window. The knowledge you gain over this life you will pass down to the ones that come after you, you want them to know what’s real, trust me. 

Even if it’s just a little bit, just a weekend trip out of town. 

Embracing the uncomfortable, the newness, and often the strangeness. 

Abandoning fears and inhibitions. 

Making a lifelong friend in some shitty airport bar. 

Feeling the connectedness of the world and at the same time the vastness of it, remembering that as individuals we make up such a minuscule portion of it. 

It helps us grow and connect to reality.

So yeah maybe you’re too broke, thankfully there’s hundreds of free or severely discounted options in the world like WWOOF. 

WWOOF provides travelers with host families in countries across the globe who will house you in exchange for work on the hosts farms. 

From Azerbaijan to Tanzania there are host families everywhere happy to welcome those who are on the pursuit of experience. 

Maybe you don’t have the freedom right now, most people don’t. That’s ok, the lust for it is the first step in conquering that issue. Where there is a will there is a way, it’s just remembering that there must always be the will, or it will truly never happen. 

So

Where will you go? 

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” -Mark Twain

Lukas Skye 

Thejackalsatlas@gmail.com

Insta: @skyeline_ 

Photo by: Leah Chen