Why We Travel Response (4)

Pico Iyer gives many reasons as to why people travel. The ones he mentioned that truly resonate with me are: "We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves," and,
"Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love." These resonate with me because every time that I travel, I find myself discovering things about myself that I never knew, and I constantly feel the euphoric state that comes with falling in love when I am experiencing this new place. When you first fall in love with someone, all you can see is the good in them; anything annoying or negative about them is ignored because you have such a positive image of them in those first moments of the relationship. That is often the case with travel. When you are living in a place for many years, or perhaps your entire life, you can easily see the bad aspects of the area in which you live; however, when you are vacationing to a place, your mind tends to automatically become open to and aware of the beauty that exists in this place—  even if the natives and the locals no longer see it, you, as a visitor, see it all. Every experience while traveling is an adventure full of endless possibilities; as Iyer says, we "lose ourselves" then "find ourselves." In experiencing what your destination has to offer, you suddenly become more open-minded; for instance, I would never eat chocolate, yet in Switzerland I was in love with the idea of real Swiss chocolate and sampled many varieties. By immersing myself in the culture and, in this case, "losing myself" in real Swiss chocolate, I "found myself wide open" and discovered something new about myself: a taste for dark chocolate. In order to truly experience a new place while traveling, you have to open your mind to what is offered to you there and allow yourself to fall in love with it. As Iyer writes, "the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew it a different light, and from a crooked angle", and, "what we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it." Having an open-mind while traveling is the key to seeing the beauty of the destination and loving every moment of the trip.