How Travel Changed My Life
Getting out of my head to explore the world.
Travel solidified my personal philosophy. What I learned by traveling solo in the Middle East for 7-months at age of 19 includes:
You get what you give, so be generous.
We are all connected.
The world is fragile; do not take it for granted.
Be present in each moment.
Move through life with gratitude, energy, and enthusiasm.
At some level, these lessons were always available to me. I could have learned them from my family perhaps, without having to hitch-hike and pick-up odd jobs in the Middle East. However, I needed to learn them for myself. That trip broke a spell of sadness and built resilience for everything that came next.
Life felt dark before blowing up every routine to immerse myself in different cultures. As a sophomore at Brown University, I got mired in existentialist philosophy that first made me angry and then spiraled to hopelessness. Too much Nietzsche (“to live is to suffer” / “there are no facts”) and not enough perspective.
At the end of that school year, I randomly found my way to kibbutz Degania Bet in Northern Israel. A kibbutz covers room and board with a small stipend for incidentals. I had sold my airline baggage space to a courier company in order to fly for just $100 from JFK to Tel Aviv. I had one, small carry-on suitcase with me; I was so unprepared that my luggage wasn’t even a backpack.
I received an assignment teaching swimming lessons to gaggles of Israeli children in their Olympic-sized pool, with F-14’s flying overhead patrolling the border with Jordan. I worked with volunteers from South Africa, Germany, and Denmark. We went water skiing on the Sea of Galilee and tubing down the Jordan River. These were places I had heard about in church on Sundays that were now our playground. We had early shifts to harvest bananas, oranges and dates and then late nights playing the same few tape cassette of recorded music every night in an underground bomb shelter that had been converted to a bar. What had been in history lessons and books became full of life and adventures.
Bomb shelter / bar
The community lived, worked, and cared for each other, unified by a clear purpose to make a successful life together in a harsh environment. I learned about desalination and innovative ideas for thriving in an unforgiving desert environment. I saw women solve work-life balance through collective child-care arrangements. I heard people argue ferociously over politics, particularly what variety of co-existence was desired with Palestine and other Arab neighbors, and then come together to prepare a communal meal.
I gained perspective. I snapped out of my own head and felt a larger context of the world around me. I understood that my own problems were ridiculously small.
This first experience of living in a foreign culture with different beliefs and norms fired up my curiosity and launched a lifetime of adventure. After this reboot on the kibbutz, I continued to travel the region. Adventures included:
Staying with Jabaliya Bedouin in the Sinai desert; hearing stories around the fire about how they trace their ancestry to those who built the near-by Saint Catherine Monastery in the 6th century.
Singing Beatles songs and drinking apple tea with a family living in a hillside cave in Cappadocia, Turkey. Their cozy home was built on top of ~1,000-year-old underground cities and tunnels that early Christians used to escape Roman persecution.
Enjoying an invitation from a small Kurdish town and spending the day slaughtering and cooking a lamb that they generously shared for my visit.
Selling time shares to cruise passengers as a gig to pay travel expenses around the Greek islands.
Galloping on a horse around the Great Pyramid in Giza, feeling like Lawrence of Arabia for unforgettable moments. Then posing on a camel.
The impact of these adventures were feelings of gratitude and accountability. Life became a “make your own adventure” opportunity. I felt energized and empowered by the insight that I am going to get what I give, and every day is a gift. No matter what, I had the capacity to:
Be curious.
Feel empathy.
Broaden my perspective and challenge my assumptions.
Loosen up and laugh.
I figured out that if I had so much autonomy over where I was going to be and what I was going to do on any given day, then it was clearly my accountability to determine my mind-set. These lessons and gifts of travel have made all the difference to me. By sharing my passion for purpose-driven travel, I hope it will make a difference for you.
