Finding Yourself Through Travel

Finding yourself through travel is one of the most noted reasons of people to set off on an adventure. Travel for a year and you will find yourself. This is the typical advice of seasoned nomads. But do you really need to find yourself? How and when did you get lost?

In this post we challenge the notion of finding yourself through travel, as well as shed some light on how you can develop yourself through travel.

“Travelling is my precious time to find who I really am.”

– Unknown

In case you haven’t already done so, read our Ultimate Guide to Sabbaticals. It explains everything about sabbaticals and how they may be used to rediscover your priorities in life.

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Finding yourself vs. a gap in your life

Oftentimes traveling is being viewed as a gap filler between different life chapters – to bridge time between high school and university, between university and starting the first job, or in between jobs. You might be familiar with the term ‘gap year’.

During a gap year the person can be pursuing any activity or passion that is out of the ‘regular’ life and very frequently such an activity is travel.

We have been wondering about the term ‘gap year’ and its inherent connotation. Is traveling ripping a gap into our lives? Is the path of graduating, going to college, starting a career, working, and eventually retiring the ultimate path of life? And does interrupting this society-suggested route mean taking a detour – creating a gap?

Isn’t every step we take and every decision we make building up to our life as a whole?

We wonder if something like ‘gaps’ in our life exist. Obviously not literally, otherwise we could just live forever, pausing life and re-playing after the gap. But what about the metaphorical meaning of designing gaps in our life through travel?

Is traveling to find yourself a cliché?

Traveling is often coined with the cliché that those who travel are lost. And most likely, if you ask travellers about what made them leave everything behind and travel the world, many will tell you that they are on a quest to find something or find themselves.

Frankly, the idea of (re-)discovering who we are and what we want in life was one of the key triggers that pulled us out of our normal daily lives into the world. We have been on our journey for 5 months already and many people are asking us how we are spending our days.

Sometimes we are jokingly wondering if people imagine us lying in a hammock with a cocktail in one hand and a half-read book in the other one, contemplating about the meaning of life. And while we can surely admit that there might have been a few moments like these, our daily travel life is less glamorous (or pitiful) than that – depending on what perspective you take 🙂

You might roll your eyes, but traveling is a hell of a job!

It’s a lot of planning, commuting, seeing, and doing.

At the end of the day we are falling into our beds exhausted, and especially when travelling with somebody (in our case the partner), you often don’t have or don’t take much me-time. Finding yourself seems almost like a luxury, but then again how do it really work?

So with all this busyness, how does finding yourself work?

Is such a thing as finding yourself at all possible?

Ok, first of all, let’s clarify the terminology. You don’t really need to find yourself.

It’s not like you suddenly went missing in the first place.

You are here. In the present.

Hello…!

We like to think of it rather as reflecting on your status quo, determining what will bring you happiness. In the present and in the future. Moving obstacles out of the way that are currently preventing you from being happy.

Traveling on its own will not give you all the answers. What we mean by that is that you probably won’t magically find who you really are while enjoying a luxury cruise in the Maldives for 3 weeks.

Finding yourself takes some time and depends on certain ‘side effects’ of traveling that naturally gear you up for this discovery process. Read below why.

1 Distance to the known and usual will give you space to think beyond your routine

Most of our daily thinking is subconscious and practical in nature. It occurs on the most shallow layer of our consciousness and has mostly only a short-term effect.

On a related note, check out our post about 6 Signs that You’re Ready To Quit Your Job and Travel.

Examples are thinking about your schedule for the day, your to-do’s for the week, or what you’re going to cook for dinner. But this is not all.

Then there is the more creative thinking. That’s, for example, working out a new idea or solving a problem at work, planning a vacation, or thinking about the next career move or promotion.

Both types of thinking rarely go beyond the obvious. And honestly, it’s good and it gives our days a purpose and a meaning. Yet, finding yourself requires surpassing those usual thoughts.

Have you ever consciously taken the time to answer the following questions for yourself:

What are things, activities, environments, people, (etc. etc.) that make me happy?
Which values are important to me?
What are experiences or skills that I want to gain in my life?
How should my life look like so I can be happy and proud looking back at it?

All these are questions that often don’t get asked or answered in our every day lives.

And yes, it might seem like opening pandora’s box. Still, there is no better way of cherishing yourself than allowing yourself time and mind space to listen to your own self.

2 Leaving your home waters will give you eyes to see new opportunities

There is an anecdote from David Foster Wallace that goes the following.

A fish is asking another fish: “how’s the water?” The other fish replies: “what the hell is water?” The point is that we easily forget that what surrounds us is only normal because it’s what we’re used to.

In our routine life we mostly do the same activities, interact with the same people, and roam the same places. Plus, we see other people doing the same things, interact in the same way, in the same environment. This makes it easier to stick to the known and not look over the boundaries of our box.

Leaving the safe harbor, jumping into the cold waters, meeting new people – all this stretches our horizon. And once it’s stretched, it cannot narrow anymore.

You will meet people from all kind of walks of life, with new ways of living and making their income. There is so much inspiration and so many opportunities of (re)designing our lives available to us. We just have to open our eyes and recognise we are in the water to see them.

3 Testing your stress levels will teach you new things about yourself

How do you react in extreme situations?

There is hardly any better way to push your stress buds and explore your limits than while traveling. Every day is a stress test. You’re out of your comfortable environment, far away from family and friends.

You will have to deal with different things. People that are annoying. Bus schedules that are delayed or cancelled. Sheets that are not as white as you wish them to be, hospitals that look like prison cells. And if you travel budget, the inconveniences and challenges plunge even more.

Hot and stuffy bedrooms, ice cold shower water, days without fresh fruits or vegetables. You will have to sacrifice on comfort, not even speaking about luxury.

There will be days you will ask yourself why you are doing it to yourself.

It’s so much easier at home on your comfy couch with a cup of tea of which you don’t have to doubt whether it’s cooked with clean water. But that’s the point! Exploring your limits to the extremes will make you realise what you love and what you value.

You will grow and find out new things about yourself. Potentially also work on some skills like planning, being open around strangers, and accepting towards new cultures and habits.

We have written a detailed article about whether Travel Is A Cure For Burnout, make sure to give that a read if you had a burnout or are close to it.

4 Learning from other cultures and ways of living will bring the best out in you

Lastly, traveling automatically means that you will find yourself surrounded by new environments and cultures. And as bewildering as it might seem at first, it will bring out the best in you.

Visiting developing countries showed us how kind and content people can be in even the most difficult of circumstances.

Experiencing different cultures and religions erased popular preconceptions and opened our eyes towards the beauty of foreign traditions.

We were also confronted first hand with universal problems of our planet such as environmental issues and mindless consumption and waste.

Time spent on traveling, is time spent on education and on self-development. It will teach you loads about the world and about yourself and will make you so much richer, even in the most uncomfortable moments.