WHY TRAVEL ALONE
Step outside your comfort zone Solo travel allows you to step outside your comfort zone. To approach strangers as if they're already friends. In hostels, everyone is there for the same reason. We're all searching for something, you could say-- for adventure, excitement, life, love, something new and scary. We're all the same, no matter how different our accents may be. See what you're capable of It isn't until we have stepped out into the great unknown that we really see what we're capable of. Once we make that beautifully terrifying leap of faith, stupidity, or whatever you'd like to call it (for me it was a, "well, here goes nothing!") into the thing that scares you, you'll be unstoppable. But you can do it. You'll master public transit and foreign currency, exchange rates and bartering. And hey, you might even pick up bits of languages here and there. Had someone told me years ago that I'd be where I am today, a native Philadelphian living 1,000 miles away in sunny Florida, having just traveled the world alone, I wouldn't have believed them. Being alone is a beautiful thing I truly believe you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with another person. When wandering the sprawling labyrinths of Sevilla in the early morning hours or seated outside the Kafka cafe in Prague, there is no time to dwell on the past, be sad, or lonely; there is only the present moment and all its beauty. There is gratitude, awe, and wonder. There is curiosity and a deep comfort knowing you and all those around you too are part of this beautiful world, this moment. You're more open When traveling alone, there isn't any familiar conversation to hide behind. Without a friend or a phone to turn, you're more willing to make friends at the hostel, the cafe, the bar, or the event you're at. Plus, you seem more approachable and less intimidating, so go say hello! You're on your own schedule All the walking and sightseeing takes a lot out of a body. Sometimes it's nice to take the day off and relax at a cafe with a book and a notebook, to sit in a park, or by the river. Your itinerary just may not match up with a friend's, and that's just fine; this is your trip, after all, so listen to your body and your heart, and do what you want. "So why travel alone?" He asked me. He had one hand curled around the strap of his backpack and the other around the railing, steadying himself as the airport monorail t pulled us toward our final destinations. The bags at our feet held everything. Mine carried the extra weight of returning, of coming home after two months abroad.
"Why not?" I answered. I shrugged my aching shoulders and smiled with cracked lips, dry from the long flight. "But really, why?" "It was something I had to do. You have to be able to do something on your own, find out who you are apart from everything before you can really know who you are with another person." We laughed about how that answer had sounded rehearsed, but it wasn't. Many people had asked me the same question and I'd provided different versions of the same thing, but in the end I had finally figured it out. I remember the day I showed this poem to a group of students I was working with. I was conducting a poetry workshop here in Orlando, hoping to instill a love of words, rhythm, and the great artists of our world to a group of tired, half-stoned, fifteen-year-olds. So I showed them Bukowski-- the much loved, boozed up, whoremonger-- and I asked the all-important question, "Why do you write." The classroom was silent. I had gotten their attention, but they were hesitant to answer such an intimate question. Why do we write? How can we vocalize the reasons for something which, to many of us is as primal and basic as any? I of course turned to my teachers for the answers, to Bukowski and Orwell. In his essay "Why I Write" George Orwell closes with, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." And then they got it. And they scribbled ferociously in their notebooks, possessed by that demon that possessed so many of us in high school—that demon that drove us to study writing, to stay up late into the night with journals, scraps of paper, newspaper and notebooks. “I write because it makes me whole.” “I write because when I do I don’t have to think about my momma or my sister.” “I write because I want to have a future." “I write because all my friends think I’m no good, but when I’m rhyming, I know that I’ll be something one day.” |
Alyssa ShainaWriter, reader, believer. Archives
September 2016
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