Sharing and describing places I've visited is fine to a point, until straight summaries get dry and devoid of connection. In the same way, it's mildly unsatisfying to visit cities only to see but not learn from
having seen the buildings, streets, and people in these
places, which are all neutrally different from those in my hometown objectively speaking (generally). I note the surroundings, I appreciate the existence of the city, but after walking through street after street, can the visit resonate with me beyond my acknowledgement of it's shape?
I think people find interest in traveling through a plethora
of ways. If you’re interested in a subject, like architecture, history, or food, coming into contact with these things are per se interesting. Obviously, spending time with travel companions – to process new adventures together, enjoy their company, and know them better – is no doubt engaging. New places can create unusual and funny situations that add to your
personal stock of memorable experiences. Inhaling mental and physiological calm from viewing striking landscape is categorically valuable on the human level. Simply escaping regular life by traveling is a plus. Or
maybe you’re more easygoing than I am and seeing anything for the first time that you haven't exactly seen before is good enough. However, if none of these apply as they sometimes don't, the dilemma of locational apathy reemerges.
What I’ve always wanted to do but never understood how to accomplish was to make travel
fascinating by engaging with the culture of the city. I was in San Francisco recently, and the greater San Francisco area is known to have many “neighborhoods”
all right next to each other – the Hispanic part of town (Mission), the hipster
area (Hayes Valley), the expensive area (Pacific Heights), the Italian area
(North Beach); the list continues but you get the point. For each of the neighborhoods that a person doesn't personally identify with, I wonder if the key to an enriching visit is to notice something about the worldview (and value set) of
a different culture that reveals and explains fundamental differences from your
own. Experiencing how people can perceive and interact with
our world differently from oneself, and seeing the precipitation of root similarities as well as differences through all the small habitual divergences in daily life on a first hand basis - that's definitely interesting, I'd say.
For the time in my life that I have the pleasure and opportunity to travel often, finding what makes travel meaningful to me is not only fruitful but in a way, necessary in establishing the value of how I spend my time.
To the extent that I still retain information from AP Psychology, it remains among the high school classes that are still most applicable and often-referenced in my life today. As per psychological theory, the source of emotions includes both mental and physiological components. Recently, I've found the physiological component to be more tangible to me through a particularly vivid experience.
The first time I went snorkeling was with my family on vacation. I
remember my sisters and I were quite young, maybe around 10. It was a pretty gloomy day and the parents took us to a random nook
by the edge of a gulf, sea, or ocean to snorkel. My dad had two snorkeling masks he bought from Costco – and one of them leaked off the bat. We all took turns with the
other, cautiously stepping into the water, stopping at two feet depth and dunking in. My youngest sister immediately gave up, because the water was too
salty and humans aren’t meant to breathe that. My other sister and I stood
there for a while, alternatingly putting an inch of our faces below water, thinking it was so cool that we could see the pebbles and
moss so close up in the water.
That was my first snorkeling trip and the story is fairly unrelated to the main point here. Basically, I’ve gone snorkeling or semi-snorkeling a few times prior to the most recent excursion in Hawaii. On this latest occasion, I went with a snorkeling boat tour and that, my friend, was a totally different ballgame.
I, along with a boat captain and a handful of other tourists, arrived at the first snorkel destination which was an inlet area by the coast. When we stabilized, I dropped myself from the boat into the midst of the expansive water. I submerge myself and look below
the surface to be taken aback that the ocean floor was at least a hundred feet down. I’m
not sure what I thought would happen. Maybe I thought that if I didn’t keep
treading water rapidly, I would fall all the way down to the bottom. Maybe it looked like a
completely different universe and I felt wholly exposed to unpredictable creatures that might dart at me from any
angle. In the event of impending danger, my instinct to crouch down would do nothing to protect me,
since that position is meaningless as I bob in the water and am mostly defenseless in an unfamiliar undersea world.
The visual here is that I freaked out a little
bit, swam back to the boat, and linked onto the boat ladder while trying to take baby steps, attempting to peek below the water for progressively longer periods without panicking and reflexively popping back up. The snorkel mask seals your
nose, so it’s an unnatural feeling to begin with, especially because you must focus on breathing only from your mouth. More than that, the ocean is gigantic, even
just the part that I could see, and the sheer unknown induces fear. What is down there?
I took the swimming noodle they offered me and put it under my arms as I swam out a second time. This is what I found surprising: the fact that it helped massively. With the noodle,
I physically floated exactly the same as without it. However, it made me feel instantly more protected and
supported. More specifically, my body told me that I was now protected and
supported. Relief notch 1. I also had my phone with me in a waterproof case
around my neck so I tried to take pictures or to check that it was still there and fine. I couldn't even unlock it yet, because sea water interferes with the
touchscreen and makes it poorly responsive. However, even just looking at the
lock screen that I look at every day and holding my phone like I do every morning when I read daily
news, behold, relief notch 2. The effect was striking, how instantaneous it was that I calmed way down.
Underwater photography is a passion hobby, I've learned.
Physically interacting with the world matters, on a level more than just out of necessity. My physiological response system won't always listen to my logical self so I have to consider communicating with my physiology on a physical level, especially in more extreme situations. As for the phone, I fleetingly felt a little Millennial in that moment,
relying on my device to cope with experiencing the world. However, I think I can
extrapolate a little to realize that sometimes it works great to equip myself with
familiarity if it enables me to better take on challenges and unfamiliarity.
I might not even go deep with that latter one – just take it and run as justification for packing a quarter-suitcase's-worth of toiletries each week when I travel for work.
It's possible I already knew some of these things previously, like that my physical self has a real say in my life, but were things that I didn't realize from this angle. Well, consider them rediscovered and slotted among all the other correct, incorrect, and in between ways of looking at and thinking about the world in existence.
Apparently, people notice when other people travel alone. I got asked whether I was "here by myself" almost as frequently as I was asked where I come from during my
short trip to Hawaii. I could be overlaying my own perceptions here, but being
asked whether I'm traveling alone feels uncannily similar to being asked
whether I still live at home. A yes to either question elicits a “Oh… Well, good for you! *overcompensatingly brightly*”
???
Fair enough. Hawaii is first and foremost a scenic
spot, so you have an absurd amount of quiet time if you’re not traveling with
someone else.
There’s a lot of freedom in being independent. I can wind
down from my high-interaction work week at my own pace in my own way, which took about a
solid day actually, to remember how to take it easy. But it also means I need to
entertain myself and stack up the weekend with good planning. Say for lunch, I can easily spend two hours if I'm with someone else, chatting, but I don’t eat two-hour lunches on my own. Given that the concept applies to every other part of my day, my plans become that much more event-focused as I move rapidly from activity to
activity. Coffee plantation tour > Hike by a historic beach > Drive to another
beach for the sunset. Bam bam bam.
The sense of staying active and not fully relaxing is rather accurate and actually necessary for
another reason, which is that I am the only one looking out for my safety and well-being.
There won’t be anyone to brainstorm solutions if I drive myself into a ditch, wander into a bad area, or
run out of battery on my phone. No one is going to watch my stuff from getting
stolen or remind me to pack my water before I leave the hotel. I have to keep a
portion of my brain aware at all times just to maintain the baseline preventative
measures, and that's a permanent feature of traveling alone.
Hawaii was really beautiful; it was an amazing trip and concurrently a
concentrated weekend on the considerations of being on my own.
I like it. It was good. I exclaim these things with some vigor, overcompensatingly brightly, you might suspect – especially when we
consider my sunburned back, with a windshield wiper-shaped crescent of un-tan
in the only spot on my back that I was able to reach any smidgen of sunscreen. *Slow quiet exhale
out.*
For the time in my life that I have the pleasure and opportunity to travel often, finding what makes travel meaningful to me is not only fruitful but in a way, necessary in establishing the value of how I spend my time.
