Take Home Souvenirs

Short Lessons from Traveling

Every time I travel I learn something new about myself and about the world. Beyond the typical benefits that travel seems to have on overall well-being and the feeling of freedom it elicits, it also serves as a conduit to observe and reflect at a more meta level about the world and our place within it.

Travel provides both a window into another reality and a microscope into our own. It inspires action, spurs curiosity, elicits creativity, builds resilience, and tests patience. To travel is to hold up a proverbial mirror in front of our faces and see in full light the reflection of one’s strengths and flaws. In other words, travel for me is freedom, therapy and a portal into an expanded reality that is closer to Truth. Allow me to elaborate.

I spent 7 weeks traveling through Spain and Mexico through May and June this year, during which time a number of thoughts arose in response to the challenges that traveling presented. I wrote some of these thoughts in my journal as they arose. Others I reflected back on.

I have found that these valuable reminders are useful not just while traveling but even more so when we bring them home and intentionally apply them in everyday life.

Hopefully one or two resonate.

Focus on quality over quantity.

Packing for any trip over a couple weeks can be stressful. Being more thoughtful about each item of clothing and how they go together will save space, reduce stress during the trip and is probably simpler than it sounds.

If you pack 5 shirts, 3 pants, 2 shorts, 1 jacket, 3 accent pieces (layers, scarf, funky shoes) this gives you 240 combinations of clothes. If you focus on the quality of these items of clothing, you can cut the quantity. People generally won’t notice if you wear the same shirt more than once per week if you style it with something else. Pack smarter, not more.

Realizing this, is it then worth re-evaluating our wardrobe when arriving home? If we haven’t worn something for 6 months, we can probably get rid of it.

If we do the same activities every week to the point that they start to blend together, maybe it’s time for a new challenge or new rhythm of life.

Similarly, if there are many people competing for our time, causing stress, it may be time to be more intentional about who we hang out with.

Quality over quantity.

Build in alone time, or simply travel alone.

It’s easy to think of travel as synonymous with vacation, and that every moment should be filled with excitement, wonder and awe. However, to superficially fill time with company just for the sake of keeping ourselves entertained is futile.

Instead, intentionally build in alone time when traveling to observe your surroundings, people watch, or simply sit on a bench. Take in the scene or quite literally stop and smell the flowers.

These pauses allow us to fully reflect on our experience, enhance our appreciation for the small and often quirky details of the trip, allow us to better appreciate when we are with our company and give us space to formalize thoughts.

Similarly, many of us try to fill our day to day lives with constant companionship. Community is a powerful and healthy part of life, but learning to be happily alone is a superpower.

Happiness is not something any other human can give you but rather is born from within. Practicing being alone is not just enjoyable, but it also teaches us to be comfortable with no one but ourselves, free of the need for others, and shows us how to cultivate joy and contentment from within.

Carve out time for things you want to do, or they will not happen.

I started my trip thinking I would finish writing two medium articles and read two books within the first week. I read about 20 pages. I wrote for zero minutes.

Granted, I was doing other vacation-y things, but we all have things towards which we would like to dedicate more time. We also know that these things do not just happen on their own; we need to carve out time for them. Having the desire to achieve is not the hard part, saying no to other things is.

There has been much said about the power of saying no, but it’s easier said than done. Saying no requires mental effort, planning, mutual agreement with others, potential anxiety of missing out on another experience and often awkwardness of letting people down or creating a negative “vibe” by being the wet-blanket.

It makes it even harder that in many cases you actually want to do the thing being proposed. However, to accomplish anything meaningful in life is to learn to say no to the things (people, experiences) you would like to do, to make time for the things (people, experiences) you can’t live without doing.

Call Home

Build in time to stay connected to your friends and family. Call a different friend / family member every few days to catch them up on your travels, your troubles, your life. Ask about theirs. Offer thoughts. It will help you stay grounded, appreciate your experience more, and solidify the memories.

When we’re young, it’s easy to stay connected to friends because our modern education system is structured such that you spend the majority of waking hours around the same group. When you become an adult, you lose touch naturally with everyone forming their own families and lives. It becomes increasingly harder to stay connected so we have to be intentional.

After going through potentially long bouts without speaking, it’s easy to put pressure on ourselves to spend hours catching up with old friends or family. In reality however, a short 10–20 min conversation would suffice and is much more likely to happen.

Personally, I like to have a specific question to ask, or specific experience to share with the person whom I call. This shows the person you were thinking about them specifically and will make the conversation more engaging for both parties.

Whether you’re gallivanting around the world or just passing a routine week, sharing experiences with others, and hearing about theirs is cathartic.

Lower expectations and increase curiosity.

We have the tendency to create preconceived notions of what an experience or person should be. This is more true than ever when you’re planning a trip. For many, planning and anticipating a trip can be almost as enjoyable as going on the trip itself. This is great for helping get through a boring day job, but it means that your expectation for the experience is sky high.

It’s easy to build up a high expectation for a specific experience (vacation, event, excursion, person) but when it doesn’t reach those expectations, we are let down. When it does, it’s simply par for the course.

I’ve found that if I lower my expectations about something or someone, the better experience I’ll typically have. My focus shifts from comparing the actual experience to the expected experience towards noticing the small, pleasant, unexpected surprises life gives us.

This does not mean attempting to remove all the emotional excitement from planning a trip or meeting a new person. Rather, it’s to focus on channeling at least some of that excitement to what makes you curious about that experience, and removing the expectation of pleasure from the experience.

Explore what elicits curiosity, with a blank mind, open to whatever the experience has to bring.

Take more naps.

After three straight nights partying until 5am or later in Ibiza, a 3 hour nap on the beach seemed warranted. However, napping should not just be utilized when in recovery mode.

We give ourselves permission to relax and do nothing when we’re traveling but not often when we’re in the grind of our day to day lives. We have to be productive 24/7 with constant to-do lists and bottomless inboxes. In the non-stop grind of modern western life, a short pause a few times a week will have outsized benefits.

A nap should be used as a shower for the mind. It’s a quick cell charge. It’s nature’s espresso shot, without the crash, or heart palpitations. A nap is an intentional pit stop to re-assess if we’re on the right highway, refuel and re-aim towards our destination.

Besides these many physical benefits napping can bring (if practiced properly), a nap is powerful in other ways. It’s a mental reset and a way to partition off the day; to start fresh. If you have trouble napping, try Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR). You’ll get almost all the benefits of napping without the pressure to fall asleep.

Nap in your car. Nap in the park. Nap in your home. Nap on some spikes (like I do). Figure out how to make napping work for you and reap the benefits.

Indecisiveness wastes time and incubates anxiety.

For the first two weeks of the trip, I ruminated extensively about the various options for each day and night. While I still had a wonderful trip, the over-thinking led to lots of wasted time. With effectively endless options for how to spend our time during vacation, decision paralysis looms and anxiety sets in.

The extent to which we should analyze decisions of course differs depending on the decision. Buying a house has different implications than choosing an avocado in the produce aisle. But even for the major decisions we make, we will never have all the information available to make the “perfect” one. And if we somehow do have all the information we won’t be able to process it in a useful way. Machines are built for data processing. Humans are not.

We struggle with the need to consider every single possible solution or option in great detail before making a decision, especially “important” ones.

Most decisions we make however are not ‘wrong’ or ‘right’, they simply come with trade-offs that we have to live with. If I’m having trouble making a decision, I put everything aside and simply reflect on the trade-offs.

Decisiveness breeds confidence and contentment. It’s incredibly empowering to spend a week not thinking so much about each and every detail and simply making a decision and moving on. Listen, collect the information you have at hand, make a decision with the consequences in mind, and move forward.

Be more intentional about your down time.

If we have 5 minutes free here or there, the inclination is to fill it with something trivial like social media, games or scrolling through photos. Sometimes that is fine, but it becomes a problem when it’s so subconscious that we don’t even notice. Recognizing when we have 5 mins of down time and choosing how to spend that time is powerful. It gives us back control of our lives and allows us to make small progress against a bigger goal.

Write — Bring a small journal and pen around to jot down ideas as they pop up throughout the day. Or use notes on your phone to write down ideas.

Read — Carry a small book around, read a few pages here and there or have a list of articles saved on your phone to quickly reference.

Think — We spend a lot of time ‘doing’ and not a lot of time, well, ‘not doing’. Sometimes, instead of looking to distract ourselves from boredom, we should lean into the boredom and let our minds take us where it will. When we do this, ideas emerge. We think of our friends that we need to call, a birthday gift for someone special, how we should really pick back up our piano lessons, or whatever. If we stop trying to suppress boredom it will pay dividends over the long run. In fact, our best problem solving happens when we are sleeping, not when we are furiously executing.

Meditate — Letting thoughts come and go without judgment is cathartic and powerful. Without going into the benefits of meditation here, I’d simply pose a challenge to find anyone who has been successful in life who didn’t incorporate some form of meditation into their lives.

It is not about being productive, it’s about being more intentional and aware of how we spend our small chunks of time, and therefore how we spend our lives. Because as we know, tiny changes compounded over time make a big difference.

Communicate

If you are traveling with someone else or in a group, over communicating on expectations for the trip is critical.

Two people viewing the exact same situation see two completely different realities. No other person can possibly experience our inner thoughts, feelings, perspectives, and expectations in the same way that we do. Expectation setting can be uncomfortable in the beginning, but will save lots of headaches and anxiety in the long run.

For example, make sure everyone agrees on the rental car upgrade.

Stop trying to do everything, and just do one thing.

It becomes obvious that the US is obsessed with productivity when traveling to somewhere like Spain. Spanish people generally move slower and more intentionally throughout their day and therefore their lives.

People in Spain, France and Italy take about 2x as long to eat and drink daily than people in the US. The choice to spend more time eating leaves us less time in the day for other things, but it affords other benefits. One such benefit is deepening the connections with whom you break bread. If you have to spend 2 hours with someone you will think twice about saying ‘yes’ to lunch.

The point is not to take longer to eat, but rather to be intentional about what you are doing and fully present in that thing. There are trade offs to everything. Almost everyone wants to be a billionaire, be happy, marry their dream person, and have security. It’s not what we want that we should focus on, it’s what we are willing to give up.

We can’t do everything and be everyone. Focus instead on being present and making the most of each and every situation and you’ll immediately be 10% happier.

Being naked is awesome.

Spain is known for nude beaches as there is generally less of a stigma around being naked / exposed in front of others. It’s just a way of life. I gave it a try years ago on one of my trips to Spain, and I’ve been a supporter since.

Find somewhere to get naked in nature, preferably with a view. I like to stand tall and imagine I was a nomadic hunter gatherer who just came back to the tribe after a successful hunt and I’m about to devour the woolly mammoth I just took down … Is that weird?

But seriously, shoving away your boys or girls all day every day is definitely not how we were meant to live; even just going commando even has its benefits. Either way, there are few things as freeing as being unattached physically to anything but the earth.

Sun at your own risk and be aware of your neighbors when you do it at home, but figure out how to get naked more.

Travel to Live.

Every so often I like to pick somewhere to travel for a few weeks and execute my typical routine, which I did in Madrid for about 2 weeks of my last trip. I found a local coffee shop to work from, a gym, and a grocery store. I cooked at home instead of eating out, and looked for local events to attend, visualizing my life if I were to live there.

Even if for just a week, this approach unlocks a new level of experience. It shifted my mindset from trying to pack in the most amount of touristy stuff possible to simply living as I would. It allowed me to experience the city in a different light by parsing out whether I actually like it, or you just like the idea of it when vacationing.

When you shift your mindset to that of a local in a different city, you see the world in a new light. Your problems, concerns and issues from back home become trivial as you experience an expanded reality. No matter where I travel to, I've found the more I interact with locals from other cities, the more I realize how narrow my world view is.

Can we do this in our lives at a micro level? Try a new coffee shop. Go out dancing somewhere you normally would not. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Make friends with people outside your immediate circle.

Changing our environment from time to time can spur creativity by removing ourselves from our bubbles, and help us take a more meta perspective on our lives and place in it.

Do less, think more.

Two weeks into my 7 week trip my work computer broke. After an initial period of panic, I came to terms with the fact that I would not have a computer for a week. I had to work from my phone — take calls, review decks, answer emails — while I waited for a new one to arrive. The only tools I had were a pen, notebook, and my brain.

When my new computer arrived on a Friday I thought I would have to spend the weekend catching up. But something interesting happened. I had spent so much time critically thinking through the problems from the week instead of mindlessly executing a solution, that once I had the tool to do so once again it was a breeze to simply execute.

If you are a knowledge worker, you are probably less tied to your computer than you think. Working from your phone for a few days is extremely doable. People pay you for your mind, not for your physical presence, or for your volume of low quality output.

Spend less time executing and more time thinking, and prioritizing. You’ll spend less time overall because you’ll be focused on what’s most important.

Spend your energy wisely.

Traveling comes at a cost. It expends a significant amount of mental energy that would otherwise be spent in other areas. By its very nature, travel puts you in an unfamiliar place. All the planning, searching for places to get food, dealing with unexpected circumstances, etc will drain your mental and physical energy. Don’t expect to get as much done as you otherwise would at home and don’t expect to be cozy and comfortable the whole time.

People think a lot about how they spend their money and how they spend their time. We think less about how and where we spend our energy. Managing your energy is just as important to be effective and happy in life.

Take home souvenirs.

I don’t mean the small statue of the Eiffel Tower they charge 20 euro for. When you return home, carry the travel mindset with you.

One of my favorite things to do when I travel is to spend a day simply walking and exploring a city, unplanned, open to what the day has to offer. Yet I almost never do this in my home city. You will learn more about a city mindfully wandering around for 2 days than you will reading an entire novel or watching a documentary on it.

Let the city take you where it will. Stop at a place you didn’t plan to stop, or normally wouldn’t. Have a drink at 10am. Keep a wide mental aperture and carry this mindset with you when you go home.

Our mindset controls our reality and we have the power to change this reality by simply shifting our point of view. Bring home the wonder that travel brings and open a window to an entirely different reality that can be experienced with a simple shift of mindset.

Expand your reality.

Many people think of travel and vacation as synonymous. We typically associate both with pleasure, enjoyment, relaxation. But travel is not vacation, it’s so much more. It brings us closer to the reality of truth and self. It is a critical mechanism by which we educate ourselves and grow as people, forcing us to peer externally into the world, internally into our own minds and try to make sense of the intersection of the two.

The human mind does not have the capacity to process the true complexity of reality so we create our own micro realities. Like prisoners in Plato’s Cave we stare at shadows, sometimes our own, thinking they are Truth. If we seek to break from the bonds of these incomplete realities, learn more about ourselves and Truth of the world, to escape the cave, then we must find portals to connect the mundane to the meaningful, and to make sense of these connections in everyday life.

Travel provides one such portal.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson to be learned from travel is that life's lessons need not be reserved for times spent outside our country, miles away from home. Perhaps we can learn, grow and evolve simply by slowing down, living everyday life more intentionally, tuning into the world around us and of course, by getting naked, and taking more naps.