Travel doesn’t really need a reason – all it needs is inclination. It’s perfectly okay to travel just for the heck of it. And yet, we find ourselves asking and being asked, time and again, Why Do We Travel?
To us, Travel is something deeply personal, and there are as many reasons for traveling as there are travelers around the world. But here are a few popular reasons that so many of us seem to connect with.
Travel for Novelty
There’s something intriguing and addictive about all things new and unfamiliar, and nothing quite gives us as many new things and experiences to try as Travel does. Curiosity takes us so far when we allow it to.
Travel to Seek Adventure
For some of us, that tug in our tummy, the thrill of an adventure – it’s more intoxicating than the most exclusive brew. We cannot wait to feel our heart pump as we climb mountains, jump off cliffs, feel the wind in our hair, get drenched in the spray, or dive into the deep blue depths.
Travel to Appreciate a World Different from our Own
After spending months and years surrounded by cold grey concrete, the dense green forest feels so alive and refreshing! Or perhaps it’s the silence of snow-capped mountains that gives us respite from the sweltering heat of a bustling city. Or after the materialistic and mechanical interactions with our colleagues and coworkers, our hearts yearn for the simple pleasures of coexisting in a tiny village. Travel offers that much-needed change from our dreary, humdrum everyday lives.
Travel to Appreciate the World we call Home
It’s human nature to take our lives and homes for granted. But when we get back from a long trip, we find – the best slumber is in the comfort of our own bed after all those nights spent on the road. The luxury of a long hot shower washes off all the exhaustion and grime. The familiar faces of our loved ones waiting to hear all about our epic adventures give us more joy than we had imagined. We’d never realize how beautiful it feels to come home to familiarity and comfort if we never traveled in the first place.
Travel to Escape
A stressful 9 to 5? A demanding, unreasonable boss? A painful break-up? Life knocks us down every once in a while, and sometimes the best medicine we can offer ourselves is a change of scenery to recuperate. To just leave it all behind and find something and somewhere that fills us up with good juju again – until we’re healed and happy enough to tackle the next set of life’s challenges.
Travel to Find Perspective
We spend so much of our time zoomed in on our life and it’s problems, and sometimes it leaves us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and lost. We find ourselves going through the motions of life mechanically, not quite sure of the point of it all. At such times, taking a break, zooming out and looking at our lives from a distance with the rest of the world as a size reference – it can really help us sort through our thoughts and find our focus.
Travel to Feel Accomplished
Every day on the road presents us with a new challenge. Travel teaches us valuable life skills and tests our resourcefulness and resilience. Whether it’s climbing a mountain or finding our way around an unfamiliar and chaotic city, every trip we finish successfully gives us one more thing to be proud of.
Travel to Connect
Traveling brings people together and helps them discover sides of each other like nothing else. It helps us realize the joy of connecting with our fellow humans, and also sometimes the pain points. Whether we travel with our friends, with our partners, with our families, or with our colleagues – we can be sure that we’ll return from our journey knowing a little bit more about each other, a little bit more connected. And for those of us who set out on our journeys alone, we find that we’re enriched by the connections we make on the road.
Travel to Celebrate
Whether it’s a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, or any other landmark moment of your life, the idea of a celebration is to relive the joy and make some new happy memories at the same time. In the spirit of making memories, there’s nothing quite like travel to understand the value of experiences over things. Traveling with loved ones can bring the shine back to the relationship and the sparkle back to all their smiles. What more reasons would we need to pack those bags?
Travel to Discover Yourself
Every so often in life, we find ourselves pondering existential questions – “Who am I?”, “Where is my life heading?”, “Is this the path I want to be on?”. In the midst of all the distractions and demands of daily life, we often find ourselves procrastinating on answering these questions for ourselves. Travel (especially solo travel) often gives us the much required time and space to contemplate life and understand who we are, who we want to be, and what it is we want from life. And once we do figure it out, it can also give us the confidence to make those rather scary changes that we might need to make to make our aspirations a reality.
Travel to Discover the World
“What is West of Westeros?” The question that set Arya Stark’s course at the end of the Game of Thrones series might well be fictional, but the spirit of adventure and the desire to discover the world are very real motivations for why so many of us set out on the road. Our quest to see what the world looks like from the top of a mountain or from the bottom of the ocean, or how life feels in a busy city or a remote village – it remains one of the strongest reasons to travel.
