As I roll into my final day in Europe, I'm overwhelmed by the memories I've made in Spain, Portugal, Italy and for a single afternoon, Switzerland. I've seen a myriad of mankind's most impressive art and architecture ranging from the Sistine Chapel and canals of Venice to motion-activated escalators. I've reunited with many of my Euro-dwelling friends and was overwhelmed by their hospitality. I've eaten mindblowingly flavorful food that is steeped in tradition. I've retraced the footsteps of saints and geniuses alike. And I've worn some variation of the same five articles of clothing every damn day.
Through my travels up to this point, I feel like I've grown as a person and as a human organism. I've been pushed out of my comfort zone a million times. I've been forced to acclimate to new environment after new environment. I've made a fool of myself like never before and I found out that, much to my chagrin, my mother is still very capable of massively embarrassing me. I know it's going to take me years to wrap my mind around everything that's happening to me in this very moment. And that's okay - it's okay to live now and learn later.
Allow me to officially begin my lengthy pontification with the point of endless independence.
It's rare in life that we have full autonomy. Most aspects of life that we so cherish also serve as restraints - family, relationships, jobs, hobbies, communities, etc. While these things provide a sense of purpose and belonging, they also dictate our behavior. We live for them while living under them.
When you're in full travel mode and your itinerary is blown wide open, you only have two things that dictate your behavior - time and money. Everything else (within reason and lifestyle preference obviously) is up to you.
The resulting freedom can be euphoric - one realizes the endless possibilities of a single day and life finally feels completely lived, fully experienced and incredibly interesting. A hint of this feeling I experienced while traveling through the Balkans five years ago and it's the same feeling that catapulted me into this adventure of a lifetime I find myself in the middle of today. You've escaped social tethers! You are your own man! You can be the person you want to be and capitalize fully on the wanderlust you've felt at your office job for the last several years! This feeling is intoxicating and I keep having these freak out moments of clarity where my heart races and I just have to stop and tell myself "You're really here. This is really happening. My God."
While euphoric, this freedom can also lead to massive loneliness. You're floating around the globe, carried on the wings of lightness and though you can do anything you mean nothing. You have nobody waiting for you to come home today, you have nobody to report to, you have no responsibilities of any sort, your presence has little impact on the locals who oftentimes see you as just another fly in the meat and you exhaust yourself hoping exposure to the exotic will fill the dearly missed void of the familiar. You exhaust yourself so much that it takes a night of stomach-wrenching agony in Madrid and a subsequent 36 hours of fever sweats and horizontal positions until you finally accept the fact that your body just. needs. to. rest.
While there are a million little choices to make each day, they are all made under the colossal shadow of needing to further your life purpose and you question whether seeing any of this new stuff and meeting these new people will actually make any real difference in your life. You can't help feel that all the other people trying to make a living producing comedy are back in the U.S. working their asses off at their dream while you're out here bumming around like a ascetic.
As an attempt at piecing these thoughts together, allow me to say that I believe true travel really cuts to the heart of your humanity. While you feel so many things - some amazing, some terrible - you realize that this is what living is all about. It's the good and the bad. It's the pretty and the ugly. It's the lightness and the weight. It's the exhaustive list of additional dualities of which we habitually place ourselves somewhere in the spectrum.
When my thoughts are at their cloudiest or my raison d'être seems indistinguishable, there is only one thing I can do: hope. I need to hope that everything I'm experiencing now will make sense later. I need to hope that everyone back home still loves me and hasn't entirely forgotten about me. I need to hope that the choice I've made to blow three years of savings on a trip around the world will pay off in intangible ways as it certainly won't bring about physical assets save for a slender, tanned frame. Most importantly, I need to keep my faith in humanity. I need to trust people are who they say they are, that they actually want to help when they offer to and, without putting myself in a dangerous situation, presume positive intent.
Up until this point I can't fathom how blessed I have been by those I've encountered along the way. They are the ones that carry me through. No matter where I go and who I meet, people are there to help me, they want me to find my way, they want me to enjoy my stay and they want to hear about who I am and what I'm about. And even though at times it feels like I'm recycling the same travel itinerary incessantly and investing in relationships today that will be over tomorrow, I hold out hope that life is better when surrounded by new friends. I hold out hope that human diversity should be a blessing not a curse. And I hold out hope that I will continue to be accepted by those I encounter even if I look like the BFG who lost his razor.
Faith in people. At the end of the day it's all we have. And right now, I'm at the mercy of this truth. As I prepare to fly to Bangkok on Wednesday, I'm filled with a cocktail of apprehension and excitement about how different the culture will be. When all our usual surroundings have disappeared into another plane-winged sunset, we must turn to the people around us and trust that our common humanity will be the link that connects us in the face of our differences.
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