Life is short. If you’re waiting to travel the world, don’t. Start planning. Even if the trip is years away, commit to it, start saving, and then go.
Why this advice on the Active Living blog?
Because while “active living” can mean incorporating greater physical activity into daily life (e.g., stealing 30 minutes for a walk during lunch, committing to some kind of daily exercise, spending half your day at a standing desk), it can also mean breaking the mold of doing the same old thinking, in the same old places, for so long that eventually the days, months, and years seem to blur into a great swath of… sameness.
In other words, “active living” can mean hitting the road.
I’m guessing you’ve probably thought of one day taking a big chunk of time—like several months at least—and leaving home, exploring some of the stranger (to you) places the world has to offer. Or maybe you’ve already done it.
My wife Laura and I talked about doing this for years. And one fall evening, months before we got engaged and a year before we got married, we were sharing our standard Chipotle dinner (the classic money-saver: split a burrito bowl and tortilla chips), wondering what the years to come would hold for us, when we finally decided that heading to grad school (or whatever else) could wait a year. We needed to put our money where our guacamole-filled mouths were.
We decided to do everything we could to spend a year overseas. As a friend once put it to me: at age 60, we probably weren’t going to look back and say, “I wish I’d gone to grad school a year earlier.” Instead, if we’d never gone and seen the world for a long stretch, we’d probably wish we’d done that.
So we saved up. And because we’re privileged to have friends and family who were willing to give generously to our travel fund wedding registry, we saved up some more. Then we got married, and two days later, we flew to Thailand and began what would be a nine-month trip around the world.
We earned some money, but mostly we just tried to figure out how to spend as little as possible as we walked around cities and towns, went for long runs (many times in Bangkok’s Lumpini Park, where six-foot-long monitor lizards glide through canals and boldly cross your path), experienced uncommon (for us) modes of transportation (riverboat, motorbike), volunteered for a couple of non-profits, read more than ever, ate new and mind-bogglingly delicious foods (pomelo became one of our favorite fruits), and eventually made our way home.
It’s an absurd privilege to be able to take such a trip. You could take a travel fund and do countless good and generous things with it rather than spend it globetrotting. And even if long-term globetrotting is a fine thing to do, it can come with certain drawbacks (like stomach illness in Burma without Pepto-Bismol).
But spending several months far from home is also an education unlike any other. For one, it can take someone who considers himself worldly and knowledgeable and show him that he had only the vaguest idea of what it was like to live on the other side of the planet. More broadly, planning and then going on such a trip can—and almost certainly does—reframe your sense of yourself and what you should do with your time.
In short, what you might expect from such a trip is pretty much what happens: the rat race becomes less important. The idea that you should stop fearing the unknown (e.g., what happens when you just go?) and start discovering the unknown becomes an article of faith. And by moving instead of standing still, you gain a multitude of perspectives on whatever it is you’re looking at, be it a town on the far side of the world or your own path forward.
Why this advice on the Active Living blog?
Because while “active living” can mean incorporating greater physical activity into daily life (e.g., stealing 30 minutes for a walk during lunch, committing to some kind of daily exercise, spending half your day at a standing desk), it can also mean breaking the mold of doing the same old thinking, in the same old places, for so long that eventually the days, months, and years seem to blur into a great swath of… sameness.
In other words, “active living” can mean hitting the road.
I’m guessing you’ve probably thought of one day taking a big chunk of time—like several months at least—and leaving home, exploring some of the stranger (to you) places the world has to offer. Or maybe you’ve already done it.
My wife Laura and I talked about doing this for years. And one fall evening, months before we got engaged and a year before we got married, we were sharing our standard Chipotle dinner (the classic money-saver: split a burrito bowl and tortilla chips), wondering what the years to come would hold for us, when we finally decided that heading to grad school (or whatever else) could wait a year. We needed to put our money where our guacamole-filled mouths were.
We decided to do everything we could to spend a year overseas. As a friend once put it to me: at age 60, we probably weren’t going to look back and say, “I wish I’d gone to grad school a year earlier.” Instead, if we’d never gone and seen the world for a long stretch, we’d probably wish we’d done that.
So we saved up. And because we’re privileged to have friends and family who were willing to give generously to our travel fund wedding registry, we saved up some more. Then we got married, and two days later, we flew to Thailand and began what would be a nine-month trip around the world.
We earned some money, but mostly we just tried to figure out how to spend as little as possible as we walked around cities and towns, went for long runs (many times in Bangkok’s Lumpini Park, where six-foot-long monitor lizards glide through canals and boldly cross your path), experienced uncommon (for us) modes of transportation (riverboat, motorbike), volunteered for a couple of non-profits, read more than ever, ate new and mind-bogglingly delicious foods (pomelo became one of our favorite fruits), and eventually made our way home.
It’s an absurd privilege to be able to take such a trip. You could take a travel fund and do countless good and generous things with it rather than spend it globetrotting. And even if long-term globetrotting is a fine thing to do, it can come with certain drawbacks (like stomach illness in Burma without Pepto-Bismol).
But spending several months far from home is also an education unlike any other. For one, it can take someone who considers himself worldly and knowledgeable and show him that he had only the vaguest idea of what it was like to live on the other side of the planet. More broadly, planning and then going on such a trip can—and almost certainly does—reframe your sense of yourself and what you should do with your time.
In short, what you might expect from such a trip is pretty much what happens: the rat race becomes less important. The idea that you should stop fearing the unknown (e.g., what happens when you just go?) and start discovering the unknown becomes an article of faith. And by moving instead of standing still, you gain a multitude of perspectives on whatever it is you’re looking at, be it a town on the far side of the world or your own path forward.