How can international travel change a traveler's perspective? We create more choices for ourselves in our own lives by traveling and experiencing other cultures. We create the possibility of better understanding why we make the choices we do.
There are a lot of things that we assume can only be done one way if we've only seen them done one way. If we have never seen it done another way, we can't really make a conscious choice whether we love them or hate them. We create more choices for ourselves in our own lives by traveling and experiencing other cultures. We create the possibility of better understanding why we make the choices we do.
From an international perspective, the United States is very unusual, very distinctive. That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, just that the U.S. differs from a lot of the world. It's only a small piece of the world and so one really has to travel abroad to get any perspective on the world at large.
A majority of the world's people live on less than $2 a day. If you haven't seen the places where that's the norm, you haven't seen most of the world. So it's travel more than anything else I think, that gives me whatever ability I do have to try to act in the world with some understanding of how my actions as an American impacts the majority of the world's people as in an increasingly interconnected world. Whether we know about it or not, there are people whose lives are changed by the way we live ours, there are impacts on them, and I would much rather make conscious choices with an awareness of those impacts than be doing things that affect others without even knowing that.
When I ask people what the benefit was of taking six months, a year, two years traveling around the world, one of the big things they often say is it changed their perspective. The way it changes is very unpredictable. The things that are most valuable are the things that are most unexpected. It is the surprises that really change us and the things that are unanticipated. So people come back with a lot of different things that surprised them and lot of different aspects of perspective.
People expect a certain amount of culture shock when they travel to very different countries and I have experienced that myself, but the surprise is that the culture shock is typically stronger when we return home. That's when the changed perspective becomes apparent because we are changing - we are growing as we travel, as we see different things. It's always strange when we are traveling, so we expect that, but we come back and we discover that we see our own country, our home, from different eyes. This is because we can see choices that are being made, because we can evaluate it from a basis of comparison that we didn't have before and it looks different from that viewpoint. We expect to come home and everything is going to look the same, but we discover this home looks different, not just because we have been away for a long time and they built a new shopping mall, but because our eyes, our perspective has changed.
That's why even if you never leave home again, a trip around the world will change your life because for the rest of your life you are always going to be seeing things in light of those things you saw. You will never forget those people you saw in India who are living on $2 a day. And you live the rest of your life in consciousness that that's part of the human family.
