People are celebrating Father’s Day in my native country and I remember my dad who is 85 years old now. I am dedicating this piece of writing on him. Thank you so much for this life Dad. I love you.
When I was in middle school, my dad used to take me to his birthplace Solma, Terhathum where his mom, my grandma used to live. I remember, it was approximately one day’s travel by bus, but my dad used to take me using different route so that it would take us almost two days to reach my grandma’s house. My dad used to take the route that was little bit unexplored and uncommon. He always used to take me in different places than the previous visit for eating, lodging, and other recreational activities. He always thought and lived with the concept that traveling makes each of us more evolving which is life’s greatest accomplishment.
He taught early in my life that we get this life once so why not to live epic?
What is the point of living a life in a cage?
There is a huge difference between a tourist and a traveler. Tourist is a product designed by somebody to monetize us. As a tourist, we don’t explore the unknown, we always walk in our comfort zone with tons of instructions. Most of the time we repeat same food, same place, and same people. But a traveler is a different format, a pure form, ready to experiment the life to venture out for the unknown. My dad was a pure traveler, not a tourist.
He used to share different foods, cultures, and society that makes an amazing memory before we die. These memories are assets to inspire the next generations. Glorious life comes with full of zeal when we encounter new newness in any regard. The experience of having a meal in Johannesburg gives a new layer of understanding and memory than the usual everyday food in hometown Chicago. He tells me: the more unusual place we visit, the more interesting thing we discover. We can’t appreciate things which we can’t see.
When we travel the world, our values and goals will change, we will start to learn the value of empathy in comparison to the value of material possessions. This might be one of the reasons why Bill Gates and Warren Buffett engages so much in philanthropy. Most importantly, we realize the value of experience a lot less than cooperation, humility, and connectedness.
The secret part of being a traveler is that it destresses us from mundane rat race and help us to see the blind spots in our hamster wheel lifestyle. If we don’t travel and interact, we always feel proud at something that we already know better. This is definitely a trap zone so that we learn less and always make poor decisions. We can’t differentiate between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure, a tourism product, can be bought from a very comfort Chicago home, but happiness, a travel product, is internal. Spending couple of hours with people in Asia and Africa who make a dollar in a day gives a lot of sense of purpose of living a life. Happiest and fulfilled people travel a lot and find their own nature and match their life to it.
The person who travels and interact with others more always feel proud to see things through others’ eyes and have clear understanding of opposite perspective.
In the end, I would like to pass my dad’s motto and end this piece of writing: Embrace the challenge, travel more and deal with new people and new circumstances. The beauty of life lies on the other spectrum of the world which we are constantly avoiding.
-Yam Timsina