Brief Thoughts on Why I Travel

I just read a couple of quotes from an essay by Bob Shacochis regarding travel and vagabonding. “Whatever your resources,” he writes in an essay called Something Wild in the Blood, “the world is yours to the exact degree to which you summon the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life.”

And this is how I felt when I first abandonded life in the States for the unknown lure of the tropics: “I was unaware that there were other people like me, people who might think of their urge to travel as an acceptable characteristic of a bona fide lifestyle. Romantics, to be sure; fools, possibly; escapists, probably. Dreamers who pursued irregular but nonetheless intrepid dreams of dubious value to the social order, their minds flaring with extravagant narratives.”

Now, after nearly eight years away, time has done nothing to quell this spirit. If anything, each venture outside of my daily bubble adds fuel and further stokes the fire, making the possibility of a life of convention more distant with each passing day.