Travel Ain't No Panacea

in life •  7 years ago 

Sitting next to two old friends talking I feel like being human can have so many variations. To be a human all anything needs is your permission and you become what you give permission to. The addiction to emotions and feelings can be directed towards anything, for as long as you give permission, and as long as you have money to fuel it. Travel, shopping, eating tasty food, are experiences capitalism makes very easy to do and my generation, especially in the country I'm in, have a great love for them.

Let me tell you why I'm not in love with travel, shopping, and eating tasty food. The objective of travelling is to gain more insight into how I work, know myself better, know what I want better, escape temporarily the daily stressors. I don't see why self realization must require a total change in environment. Self realization is a function of the extent to which you dig in the networks of information that you have become, often stopping what you have become, and technically is a process not limited by environment. It's limited by your application. A more functional method of eradicating stress is to face the points that cause stress, which you do in daily life, and dig in the associations and meaning you have projected onto the point, and redefine it. Not allow stress to accumulate to unbearable levels, and allowing stress to be relieved through a few days of travel, only to repeat the grinding cycle. I'm not religious, so I don't assign a panacea cure value to travel or even eating tasty food. I see stress and lack of self knowing is primarily a function of my daily application to my accepted self definitions. Rather than approaching it from the side blaming my environment for limiting my self experience, going travelling a few times every year, I see daily differences in self application more effective, since my problems are a function of how I see things, what I do, who I am, what I am. Going travelling can be fun, but to rely on it for something I'm responsible for which is my self application, and pray to travel to inject some acumen, wisdom, insight, what have you, is delusional.

I look from the side, I wonder if people unexpectedly gain an addictive high experience or maybe realized something major about themselves during a moment in travelling, and wishing for the same level of experience constantly go travelling from then on. Both good and bad experiences serve to startle and cause one to not consider common sense. It's possible a good experience can leave you wanting and you chase after it with money in your hand for the rest of life. It's possible a bad experience can haunt you and you avoid any possibility of it happening again and you do the necessary things with money for the rest of life.

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!