The Benefits of Traveling: How Exploring Other Cultures Helps Us Grow — On The Forum
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Traveling starts long before we step our foot inside an airplane.
The silky sound of the erHu transports us to the tall, pristine mountains of China we see in films.
A colorful sari reminds us of that trip to India we’ve always wanted to take.
A whiff of the bakery on our way to work invites into our palette the memory of those sweet croissants we devoured on last year’s trip to Paris.
We cement these stereotypes into our mind. They evidence of our limited experience of our world.
Looking at a map can inspire excitement, but it doesn’t reveal the true diversity that’s sprawled throughout this planet.
Travel, language, music, interactions: These afford us a more intimate glimpse into others — their mundane lives and their internal rebellions.
Peeling the onion of the familiar
The world that we’re born into
We’re all born into a paradigm.
We grow to believe the same values, adopt similar behaviors, and we struggle with a lot of the same problems that those around us face.
In our efforts to push through the difficulties of life, moreover, we resort to familiar patterns of thinking and acting.
By getting to know the world beyond our birthplace, we come to understand that life is not only limited to what you grew up knowing.
When curiosity inspires traveling
At a certain point, we begin to tug at the edges of our familiarity. We look towards the allure of the unknown.
As part of my 12th grade AP English Literature Class we had to read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
Something really intrigued me about the book, so I went to my local library and checked out the DVD documentary Russia, Land of the Tzars.
From that point, I wanted to learn Russian. The following year I enrolled in my college’s elementary Russian course.
Perhaps growing up between two different cultures, the Dominican Republic and the United States, sparked my curiosity about other people — their way of thinking, how they behave, and their sense of right or wrong.
The Appeal of Language
What makes a foreign language so appealing? Could it be the strange syllables that form an unfamiliar, captivating sound?
In my younger years learning a language, whether it was French and Russian, was about my love of history.
Later on, my developing love of music expanded the urge within me to explore other cultures — those of the Middle East and Asia, for example.
The Call to Travel
Traveling allows us to explore the unfamiliar, and it also permits us to question whether we could live differently, and if many of our insecurities are all fabrications.
I think that part of traveling is also about finding oneself, our place in the world.
Perhaps that’s why people tend to travel when they’re young.
They either do so before going to college, or they study abroad during their studies. Otherwise, they may travel immediately after graduating.
If they didn’t travel when younger, they might choose to travel as an antidote to a life that’s become mundane.
However, not all those around us understand this urge. The desire to leave it all behind and create a new life for ourselves in another country may be equated to irresponsibility or delusion.
The antidote might be to ignore these voices, because more often than not they come from place of fear. Later on, our boldness might even inspire those who intially criticized our choices.
Traveling alone for the first time
My first experience traveling alone was a three month trip to Mexico City. I was inspired to travel there because I wanted to make a change in my life after graduating from college.
I was fearful of what could happen to me in the beginning, especially because the media often portrays the country in a negative light.
In the end, this trip inspired my curiousity even further, and I realized that living abroad is not as scary as it seems.
Giving ourselves the chance to take such risks is a great opportunity to understand our limits because it pushes us out of our comfort.
Rejection and the desire to fit in
One of the less stellar aspects of travel — especially if you decide to live in a new country — is that you’ll come across plenty of rejection in your attempt to fit in.
It’s natural.
Choosing to live in a new country, especially with the understanding that we will carry out our lives there and what that entails, makes us want to be part of this unfamiliar fabric.
It’s quite difficult, however, especially when the differences in language and culture are so strikingly different from our own.
Because I was highly sensitive when younger, the beginning of my life abroad was quite daunting.
The Language Barrier
I’m sure every country is proud of it’s language. In France, this is certainly the case.
I dreamt of traveling to France after I started learning french in high school. A required class, I was interested in the language because of the French Revolution and the allure of Paris.
When I finally made it there in 2016, my fluency was decent (B2), but my confidence was lacking. And unlike other countries where English is widely spoken (for example Sweden or Mexico), the French rarely steered from using their language.
This struggle throughout the two months I stayed there revealed to me that adjusting to a new country takes time.
Cultural Differences
Then there are aspects of the culture that are just so specific, and so innate, that it is difficult to understand them in the beginning. They compel us to abandon our individuality in favor of fitting in.
Living in Egypt taught me that culture is so engrained that all the globalization in the world will fail to uproot it.
Beyond the obvious intricacies of islamic culture , one of the things that struck me the most was the egyptian sense of humor.
I felt frustrated when my attempts to speak Arabic were met with laughter. The more I interacted with the culture however, the more I realized that this sense of humor and joking was part of the cultural fabric. It became much easier to adapt once I understood this.
Sometimes we’re unaware of the entitlement we feel about wanting to be accepted so readily into another culture.
It’s quite awe-inspiring and humbling when you understand the work and time that it takes.
Learning to coexist when you can’t completely fit in
At a certain point in your experience living abroad you realize two things:
First, it takes time to adapt to another culture, and you will eventually become part of the fabric if you persist.
Second, you will never become wholeheartedly them. The influence of our culture is something we can’t simply erase.
You begin to accept that you are in a special situation that many others go through, and you’ll learn to appreciate that you can live in more than one world.
My college french teacher once noted that being bilingual means making mistakes in two languages. I would add that being multi-cultural means having both feet planted in different pastures.
The lessons afforded by travel
Travel is a gift I chose in my early 20’s, and I hope to continue traveling more in the future.
However, my experience has already afforded me many lessons.
There is more than one way to live life
Of course this may sound obvious when you read it, but you don’t really realize how nearsighted you are until you experience the world from another’s perspective.
The first lesson that traveling taught me was that there is more than one way of living life.
We all don’t need to follow the same routines.
Our lunch breaks don’t have to be only 45 minutes.
The highlight of our day doesn’t have to be what we do at work.
Our friends don’t all have to speak the same language.
Many more choices are open to us — beyond what we can imagine.
Despite our differences, we’re all pretty much the same
The second lesson I encoutered was that we’re all pretty much the same — no matter where in the world we found ourselves.
We’re inspired by common joys: family, sports, love.
Similar fears encumber us: financial worries, violence, death.
We’re motivated by many of the same aspirations: health, happiness, wealth, success.
Therefore, instead of looking at each other like strangers with odd practices and unrelated lives, we could find common ground in the things that make us laugh and the ones that make us cry.
Traveling is a neverending classroom
I’m still in the beginning of my journey to explore the world beyond what I know, and I have so much more to see, experience and learn.
Yet the biggest thread in my experience abroad has been the recogniztion that there’s no one right way of living life.
Yes, we are all human, and we have the same needs deep down, but the impact of our culture and our history does have a big say in the way we choose to live our lives.
And contrary to my way of thinking as I grew up — that you had to follow a particular pathway to succeed in life — I’m slowly learning that this is somewhat of a fantasy, and that in fact walking down our assigned paths unquestionably might cause us a lot of pain.
This is perhaps where encountering the world can serve us beyond the basic pleasures that traveling and taking nice pictures in incredible monuments can give us.
We can learn to examine the lives of people around the world, and unbiasly examine how certain aspects of their lifestyle can serve us, can help us lead better lives.
Which is your favorite travel destination? Which city and country are at the top of your travel bucket list? What have you learned along your travels?
Share your thoughts!
Originally published at https://ontheforum.com on April 28, 2020.
