Traveling is the best Education!
For me, traveling is not only a balance to the stressful everyday work, but rather a way to get to know other regions, other religions, other people, different customs and other pleasures. Traveling expands my consciousness, reduces prejudices and makes you aware, how colorful life can be.
What does traveling mean? There is a superficial and profound motive. The superficial is of course the change of scenery, we see unknown landscapes, stroll through foreign cities, meet other people than at home. In addition, we move in the distance differently than at home and experience a pleasant contrast to everyday life. The subtle motif draws on more existential stripping: Perhaps we experience travel as a kind of promise to a life not yet lived. In this way, we can also explore the undiscovered possibilities of ourselves on the way down.
Travel dreams have not become reality for a broad mass of the population until the end of the 19th century when, due to technological progress, journeys to foreign countries and regions became possible in a pleasant way. Then started the actual tourism gradually. This began in the age of the “Belle Epoque”, however, it was initially limited only to upper middle-class circles. The Cote d’Azur, the Italian Riviera, the English Channel coast and the imperial baths of the Baltic Sea were the first destinations. There, the first hotels emerged, where met the bourgeoisie and was among its peers. At that time, traveling was a matter of social prestige, but later, when other circles were caught up in travel fever, the motive changed. They wanted to take a vacation from the bourgeois society with its strict rule corset, through which people were harnessed in everyday life. Holiday of frustration, routine and submission.
This is still driving the tourist of today, he hopes one thing above all: temporary freedom. Travel as an outlet for the frustrations of a life you do not want. This explains the bizarre forms of the all-inclusive ghettos, where the tourist can revel in paradise, where for a while he can finally do what he is barred from doing in normal life: consuming limitlessly, his social misery forget and bask in a fictional world. But let’s turn the wheel back to the way of being on the road, which is more serious and deeper. In the educated middle-class sense, the desire to discover new possibilities, to experience new cultures with the aim of exploring oneself in the stranger.
This form of traveling, supported by the Enlightenment educational ideal, was attainable for the privileged few – through the centuries the motive for breaking into the unknown, exposing oneself to the unknown and experiencing adventure. When else do we experience adventures? In normal, everyday, bourgeois life hardly, but in traveling.
We are always travelers in our lives, and not only do we live in an environment, we are cosmopolitan. This cosmopolitanism involves changing, exploring, setting up worlds – and that is what happens when you travel. You arrive somewhere, you do not know the topography of the city, you buy a city map, find your way around, look for your hotel, put things down and take a first look around the new place. If you undertake this orientation process on your own, then you can get into a very intense inner monologue with yourself. You build your own map of orientation in your mind, find your way around with time, and then you slowly become a little more at home in the new environment. This is exciting. This process is prevented if you do not make it individual, but get offered in an arrangement by the tour operator. It is more intense to be on your own. When traveling on your own, you are confronted with unequaled self-reliance. But I have to admit that the arranged cultural trip has the invaluable advantage of being well informed. What is it called? “You only see what you know”.
When I was on my way to Greece, a woman complained, “Oh, and next week I have to go to Iraq,” one tour chased the next, traveling as a strategic endeavor to avoid any self-encounter also exists, and possibly is It is a pity that we spend so little time on ourselves to really travel It seems important for me to travel on a thematic basis After each good journey I am automatically connected and you should go on a path you have taken And not travel Asia, then North America or North Africa, under the motto: I was not there yet, I have to go there The depth is in the repetition, when you experience a country for the second or third time and get to know the people better then enters the phenomenon of real encounter and deepening.
Not everyone can afford a three-week vacation these days, so there is a real limit. Of course, you put the limit on yourself, maybe we have more time than we think, maybe we weight our time so that it appears to us constantly short. But the true journey, the existentially colored travel always needs a fusion between what I see and what my soul can absorb at all. When I see too much, it’s like a window shopping trip, when I end up not knowing how many churches I’ve seen, because everything blurs. Here then quantity triumphs over quality. Qualitative travel means that there should be an encounter between me and the seen world. I always have to comment on what I see, for me to describe it in my own words, and not just to pick up the cultural text from the travel guide. No, in real travel, I’m really “there,” and it takes the time and courage, for example, to go to a temple to just sit there, watch people, and feel the atmosphere. Or attend a church service in a cathedral. It is also important to devote oneself to suddenly emerging opportunities that arise on the ground, possibly deviating from one’s own plan in order to have room for maneuver and to really let the current world flow into it. It is somehow peculiar to us to design a future that will be more beautiful, more colorful, more auspicious than the present – it is deplorable when one lives so little in the here and now, always escapes mentally and imagines a more beautiful future.
But in defense of this profoundly human quality, I must say that this is also our utopian power, and if we did not have it we would actually be poorer even in the present. But: Is it really true that we are completely different on vacation and bring new aspects of our personality to the surface, which we also live immediately? I’m skeptical about that, because we’ll find ourselves looking nervously at the clock at half past four in the afternoon, if we have not found a hotel room, for example. These structures continue to work.
And, as you know, there is also evidence that couples are on a risky business holiday because they are thrown back on themselves with unfamiliar intensity and are confronted with a closeness they can no longer master. For the philosophical journeys that I organize, I have to break a lance for group travel, because philosophizing can best be done to others, together, it makes things much easier and more stimulating. But traveling alone can also be good and beneficial in certain phases of your life.
Especially if there is a deep, deferred, unfulfilled need for proper time, if you have to spend too much time in the job or in the family. Then it can be helpful to feel at home, to walk around the area, to meet other people, to write down what you have experienced or just to take pictures. But you should leave your computer with Internet access at home, because you bind too strongly to the old world. It does not necessarily have to be answered e-mails, you can sometimes be two weeks in his life unreachable. The luggage should have what you need on the ground – music for long bus trips, books about the country, a good novel and a diary. And you should leave room in the suitcase to bring something!