Trust through travel

“If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher; bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror glass.” -Patrick Rothfuss

Travel is a privilege.

I am beyond grateful for my ability to live a life filled with travel. But I’ve come to realize that my need to travel is not to collect postcards and stories, it is to collect pieces of myself.

I have always had this pull towards travel. It exists within me in a place I can’t quite reach. I don’t have control over it. Which makes it a bit comical that I love it so much. Because most of my life is built around control. Travel allows me to step back from this way of being. For that, I am grateful.

Travel is a time where I can release control with the utmost faith. I am not sure why, but it just makes sense to me at this point in my life.

I trust the part of myself that travels deeply. Something I hope, eventually, carries into every aspect of my life. But for now, I will make sure I get my dose of travel frequently enough to remember that I, myself, am trust worthy.

Trusting life, surrendering to what is, is no easy thing to do. Most of our lives, or perhaps I should only speak for myself here. Most of my life is guided by a sense of control. I believe I am in control of everything. This is the greatest lie I have ever believed.

Day to day, I operate with the false belief that I am the creator of my own circumstances. In ways, this can be true. It other ways, this is far from absolute. I’m learning how to oscillate between these two realities.

It reminds me of the Viktor Frankl quote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom".

We rarely have control over the stimulus, but we always have control over the response. This is the beauty of living. This is the beauty of traveling.

When I travel, it is a lower stakes way to live this wisdom. “Plan and let go”, is something one of my teachers said to me several years ago and always stayed with me. While traveling, we get constant opportunities to plan and let go.

In my daily life, I can get trapped in predictability and routine. The consistency of this is soothing to parts of my being but also creates friction. The cycle of stimulus and response becomes so repetitive, it can have a numbing effect. I lose touch with the fact that I only have the ability to control my response.

Routine and consistency lull me into a sense that I am controlling it all. When it goes well, it makes me feel more confident about my ability to control my external circumstances. When it goes poorly, it gives me shame that I am not holding it together well.

I will be honest, I have made a lot of growth in this over the past few years. I released a lot of shame that made me feel as though control was my only option. Truly, a lot of this work was done through travel. Because again, travel is a beautiful space to practice letting go of control.

When I arrive in a new city, no matter where it is in the world, I do plan a few aspects for my own comfort. I typically know where I am sleeping that night and have a plan for how to get to that place. These two things are something I can plan that lower my level of anxiety. Because, yes, I still have quite a lot of anxiety around traveling even though I do it frequently.

What I’m trying to say is, we always have the ability to create a plan. But that is where our control ends. Once it is in place, we have to step back and trust. Trust that we planned well and that no matter what, it will work out. And the more I travel, the more I know this to be true.

I have yet to have plans fall apart and it truly be a bad thing in the long run. Something always becomes sweeter after the chaos of a mess. I do not believe this is luck. This is simply me learning that my response to any stimulus dictates the outcome.

When I stay open and curious. When I let go of control and don’t take ownership over a failed plan, I don’t spiral into shame. I float the wave of possibility. This is such a gift coming from myself, a perpetual perfectionist who used to use control as a measuring stick of my worth.

But if you travel enough, you eventually learn this lesson. You eventually learn that nothing is fully in our control. Control is always an illusion of the mind. A mind that is constantly trying to protect us the best way it knows how. And bless our sweet minds for taking such good care of us. And also, bless the universe for gifting me with a million opportunities to learn this lesson.

Of course, my day to day life is ripe with potential to learn this lesson but control is harder to release where routines exist. At least for me I have found it to be true. But in an environment that is intentionally unpredictable, I find ease in letting go. Trust becomes a fraction of a percent easier with every trip I take.

Whether this is because I am learning to trust myself more or the universe at large, it is hard to say. But I will take both. I will allow myself to microdose trust until I wake up every morning full of it. That way, I can always remember what is in my control and what is not.

Again, traveling is a privilege. One I do not take lightly. I will carry these lessons with the tenderness they deserve. Gently bringing them into my daily life. It will always feel like a gift to get to know myself through this medium.

To cultivate trust by travel, is a beautiful way to let go and surrender. I will take every opportunity I can.