Travel Quote: Dalai Lama

“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before”

-Dalai Lama

I am guilty of always wanting to travel back to the same places. If it was so fun the first four times, it must be my happy place, right? That is exactly right. It’s my happy place, it’s where I have friends, it’s where I have memories, it has become… and extended comfort zone.

Has this happened to anyone else? Your get-away becomes a home away from home but you stop pushing your boundaries and seeing what else is out there. For me, this is Italy. The first year I properly lived there, I grew in so many ways. I hardly know who I was before 2016! But as I grew to love my beautiful city, Florence, and adapt to la bella vita (not like it took that much effort), I became comfortable.

This year my partner will have super cheap flights, allowing us to discover new cultures, traditions, and culture shocks. Admittedly, I feel a touch of travel anxiety creep up inside of me at the thought of traveling to uncharted land. It’s the fist time in my life that far away destinations have been in such close reach. But what will taking action to quiet my anxiety show me?

Each time we travel somewhere new, we find pieces of ourselves that we didn’t know were missing. We become comfortable in the uncomfortable. We can live without everything we thought we needed. We begin to understand that the more we learn, the less we know.