Dear Dame Traveler, on the eve of 2020, I write this… heart filled with memories, gratitude and a few lessons learned. I know many of you sit and read this with the same thoughts. As a new year approaches, we often sit and reflect on our hopes for a new year. New goals, new horizons, new adventures ahead… I write this to you, dear reader, if your 2020 resolution is to see the world this year.
This is your time. This is your year to go see the world. This is your wake up call to write your intentions down (…after all, a resolution or goal without a plan is just a dream)…. and plan to go collect those passport stamps and lose yourself in a new, foreign place. Consider these next few paragraphs your pep-talk.
To travel is to learn the art of observation. To travel is to invest in and humble yourself all at the same time. Truly, to travel is to witness the world’s diversity, it’s beauty and its age… and to recognize your small, small place in it. Travel the perfect algorithm of empowering and humbling.
What passports and pictures don’t show you about travel is the intentional, reflective time it brings. We stop, we ponder, we observe, we push ourselves, we rest our heads in unfamiliar homes. We’re endlessly on edge and the dance and the balance of it all is the most strengthening thing a woman can afford herself – the opportunity to grow.
Travel challenges as much as it delights. It presses on our nerves and our anxieties, it channels us towards tests of the mind and of the spirit. Travel will make you question every little thing. And through all of this, we are able to realize our privilege, our biases, our false assumptions.
To the woman reading this needing this pep talk, to the woman reading this who’s heard a thousands reasons not to go get on that plane, to the woman reading this wondering what a new decade and a new chapter 2020 will bring – go further, seek more, see new horizons. It’s your time, dear heart.
Loved this Laura! Than you. Wishing you a wondrous year of travel ahead.