>>21221299I would like to share with you a quote from Camus about the power of traveling:
"Without cafes and newspapers, it would be difficult to travel. A page printed in our own language, a place where, in the evening, we try to rub elbows with men, enables us to mimic, with a familiar gesture, the man we were at home and who, from a distance, seems so foreign. For the thing that gives value to traveling is fear. It shatters the kind of inner decor within us. It is no longer possible to cheat—to mask oneself behind ones working hours in office or factory (those hours which we protest against so strongly and which defend us so surely against the suffering of being alone)...traveling takes away this refuge. Far from friends and family, from our language, torn away from all our supports, deprived of our masks (we don't know what the trolley fare is, and so on for everything), we are utterly at the surface of ourselves. Also, because we feel our souls to be sick, we endow each human being, each object, with its value as a miracle. A woman who dances without thinking, a bottle on the table, seen behind a curtain, each image becomes a symbol. Life in its entirety seems reflected there, in so far as our life at the moment is summed up there. Sensitive to all tones, how can we expressed the contradictory intoxications we are able to relish (even including that of lucidity)? And perhaps never has any region, unless it be the Mediterranean, taken me so far from, and so close to, myself."
and it is correct. Traveling forces you out of your comfort zone, and ultimately that's beneficial to your development as a human being. I was drinking with a welder from Michigan in Thailand once who had won a trip in a radio contest and he cried because he was having a great time hanging out with ppl he would've never interacted with back home due to his prejudices. I know that sounds gay, but getting drastically out of your comfort zone can be enormously rewarding.
