Why I Travel

not why you think…

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich)

"The only journey is the one within." 

– Rainer Maria Rilke

In 2022, I spent six months abroad. Backpacking through Western Europe, studying in Northern Spain, visiting Morocco, living in Costa Rica.

In 2023, I skied the slopes of Kelowna, gazed into the frigid milky blue ocean in Halifax (and spent a forgettable evening wandering the main streets, where I melted into a puddle and minutes felt like raindrops), hiked Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, and spent Autumn in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and parts of Patagonia.

This year, I spent January deep in the heart of Austin and Houston. Now, I’m living in Phuket—an island on the southern tip of Thailand—and will travel through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam until mid-May. And I have plans for the rest of the year simmering on the stove.

In the past, I’ve traveled for misguided reasons which led to misguided trips. It’s taken three years of trial and error to form a clear picture of why I travel. 

I don’t travel because it’s cool. Travel has become socially encouraged to the point of contagion, where everyone’s favorite hobby just so happens to be “traveling”. Many people travel not because they want to, but because it’s what other people seem to want. It’s a certain flavor of romanticism that has elevated the allure of wandering over the beauty of belonging¹.

I don’t travel to escape. I learned the hard way that I can’t get away from myself by moving from one place to another. Happiness wasn’t hidden in the cracks of Rome’s cobblestone roads and sadness didn’t vanish with Hallstatt’s morning mist. I would wake up in cities, drunk with beauty, feeling roughly the same. Confronted by the stern fact that place, as a solution, is utterly irrelevant. There are also crummy parts of travel that you will not hear much talk about because it’s so socially uncool. If I look forward to trips as they approach, I will look forward to being home even more as they end.

I don’t travel for education or to broaden my perspective. While seeing new countries has taught me about the inexhaustible variety of life and unity of the human experience—how all people love and cry, laugh and eat, worry and die—the same education can be found at home, if I choose to look at what I had previously only seen². 

The real reason I travel has little to do with the place I visit. 

I travel to leave home. To go on an adventure. To encounter the unknown. 

At home, I exist in the safety and familiarity of my known world. I speak the language. I know the roads, where not to speed. With food in the fridge and a car in the driveway, it’s easy to get complacent. To start sleeping past 7 and half-ass workouts and watch every Leafs game on TV. To go through the motions in an increasingly comfortable way.

I travel to manage the pangs of homesickness and the vertigo from zooming out on Google Maps. To remember the necessity for a friendship with the unknown. To learn to belong to my aloneness. To choose discomfort in a world where I never have to be uncomfortable again³.

We’ve lost our rituals. No one demands proof anymore that I’m capable of adulthood or raising a family. I could become a full-grown man, but never grow up.

When I’m on my own in a foreign country, I have to trust myself to arrive at an airport—a stranger in a strange land—with a backpack, a credit card, and a phone and figure it out. I’m forced into independence and driven by the hunger of necessity. It’s problem solve or perish⁴. 

Travel is my self-constructed ritual⁵. To face the unknown and prevail. To be someone who can create order out of chaos.

Last March, I had a dream that I was standing at a door. Some sort of portal. Halfway through, but terrified. Part of me didn’t want to step through. It wanted to turn back. It hated that I was asked to step through at all. 

In moments of cold clarity, I see that I still have a small, scared child within me that doesn’t want to grow up. That doesn’t want to have to die or pay taxes. That doesn’t want any of this to be real. For the stakes to be this high. He doesn’t want to pick up the mantle of responsibility but instead run back into the fortress of his mother’s arms or reach up to tug on his father’s leather coat. Shut his eyes tight enough to freeze time and keep everything just the way it is.

I travel to help that terrified child—clinging with white knuckles to the doorframe—let go.

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Thanks

kora kwok 🌊

for the conversation that inspired this essay.

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• I’ve spent the whole week in Phuket, Thailand - waking at 5am, bed by 9pm - journaling, writing, reading, and working out. With more time on my hands, I’ve been training CrossFit 3-4 hours a day.

• 26 pages into copying out The Great Gatsby by hand. Fitzgerald is one of my favorite writers of all time for his textured, romantic, and poetic style. Writing out Gatsby has helped me understand how he constructs sentences, chooses words and I’ve noticed a ton of new detail (despite my third time reading!)

• Finished listening to Tim Keller’s Questioning Christianity lecture series. Even if you have no interest in religion, I’d highly recommend the first lecture on Faith (Spotify link).

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Neurologist Sigmund Freud on the beauty within adversity:

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

📸 photo i took:

Pa Lai Pier (Phuket, Thailand)

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You got all my love,

Tommy

1. A certain restlessness flashes in the eyes of my generation. A fear of commitment that masks itself as a love for novelty. There’s a fluidity. A desire to never be quite still. One foot always out the door to the next place (new city, job, relationship). 

I think it’s also why it’s hard to find community as a young person. With transportation technology and Instagram, the ease and glamor of exploration is higher than ever. Everyone is always looking elsewhere. No one is content where they are.

2. Tourism, a particularly popular but empty form of travel, like bowling with bumpers or driving on a track, leaves one's ignorance intact and entails no education at all.

3. Modernity hasn’t made us weak, but it has given us the option.

4. Self-image is just the historical proof of my abilities. It can’t be faked. If I push myself to do hard things, I prove to myself I’m able to. The more hard things I do, the more competent I believe I am. The more confidence I have to face the future. This is important because life is hard and I need to be able to do hard things.

5. I left home for 5 years for university, but it was closer to summer camp than a rite of passage into adulthood.