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Enhancing Your Lifestyle

Nothing whisks you away from daily routine, encourages letting your hair down, accommodates tasting true adventure, and abets indulging in good old-fashioned fun… like travel does. Nor can most teachers turn the heat up on everyday life and force you to grow as intensely and unpredictably as travel. From the beaches of Baja to the barrios of Barcelona, even the most elementary insights you pick up along the road can better your lifestyle.

In Spain, enlightenment’s form came in how simple satisfactions like taking more siestas and walks by the water sometimes make all the difference in easing your inner self. Rome and Seville re-introduced cooking to me as an uplifting endeavor, rather than an ordinary chore. And Barcelona put to rest any harbored doubt that cities exist abroad fitting me in every way and more than my favorites (New York, Los Angeles, etc.) back in the U.S.

From life lessons to new perspectives, unforgettable people to further freedoms, life abroad has forever changed me. Experiences outside your comfort zone serve as fertile ground to cultivating new passions. Travel enough and inevitably you’ll explore cities that better reflect your personality, meet people you better connect with, and encounter cultures that embrace and value aspects of life closer to your heart. Often, you’ll discover you appreciate things you wouldn’t have ever imagined, and would have never known you care about without first taking the risk to venture outside the familiar.

Bettering A Global Society

Travel too strengthens bonds of international community. In Frankfurt, when wild circumstances left me with no place to stay, a young German couple I met that day invited me to stay with them as long as I needed. Having trouble accessing cash for days in Buenos Aires, my newest friends, without hesitation, rallied to support me until the issue was cleared up. More than few occasions, I’ve found myself in a foreign city, not knowing a soul nor able to speak the language, yet time and again, people – not owing me a second glance – unfailingly helped me out of some very challenging, even scary, situations.

Indeed, travel intimately embeds a human face on foreign regions. These days, when Germany, Argentina or others pepper the news or conversations, images of distant, unfamiliar countries don’t come to mind, instead my thoughts swing to my friends, to the kind-hearted strangers who came through for me when they didn’t have to, and to the extraordinary memories we share.

Today, mankind’s worldwide interconnectivity spreads faster and further than at any time in human history and all signs point to continuing the trend. Communication and transportation advances overcome geographical barriers with exceeding ease. Domestic policies more and more influence international populations. Economies via trade and globalization grow more interdependent by the day. And repercussions of an isolated occurrence in one location can loose shock-waves felt in every corner of the globe.

For better or worse, we live in an increasingly global community. No matter which way you look at it, we’re all in this thing together. So, seeing the human faces of regions around us might not be so bad. The more we do, the more likely we’ll act with a tiny bit more care, listen with even a slight bit more consideration, and move to help one another just a quarter step faster – and while not by a long shot will that save the world, it certainly remains in all our best interests…