Getaway journo, Sarah Duff, got me onto a blog on the Matador Network titled: ‘Can you really find yourself through travel?’
The writer, Sarah Kate, who had just turned 30, was travelling with her husband. She explained: ‘We’re taking the year off, traveling through three continents. We need the time to ourselves, to “shore up” our marriage. To make sure we eventually enter parenthood with no regrets — no sighs of “We should have seen Machu Picchu before we got saddled with kids!” It’s meant to be a kind of Last Hurrah of carefree youth and financial irresponsibility.’
According to the rest of her blog, she had read so many stories about travellers finding themselves and she was wondering why this was proving so elusive after so much effort on her part. ‘Do I really require so much navel gazing?’ she asked.
Pop psychologists might give these reasons for her struggle:
- The pressure of a society that expects people to get married, have kids and ‘settle down’ soon after 30
- Her mother
- A really crap journey
I argue that finding yourself is a daunting quest and if you claim to have ‘found yourself’ at a young age, like 30, you are actually fooling yourself. Surely it would take a lifetime?
I don’t think travel is the only answer – all experiences in life add up to an understanding of one’s self – but I think travel helps tremendously and it was another Getaway journo, Tyson Jopson, who reinforced something I truly believe in. He said: ‘Don’t go out to find yourself, go out to find everyone else and they’ll show you yourself.’
If I didn’t travel much I know for certain I would be a very different person today (better or worse, I don’t know). I also realise how much more I have to learn, and that’s what keeps me travelling. But it is the people I meet that make the difference.
About 12 years ago I hitched from the north of Alaska to the south of Mexico. I wanted to get away from people and most significantly I wanted to get as far away from Africa as I could because I’d had enough of all the shit. Alaska is literally on the opposite side of the globe to South Africa and has a population density lower than Namibia, so that seemed a good place to start.
But the truth was that hitching threw me together with many people and I discovered I was quite the opposite – that I liked peoples’ company. I liked finding out who they were. Some people I travelled with for an hour, others for days. With one person I travelled for three weeks.
The time I spent alone – hiking at the base of Denali (Mount McKinley) or in the Canadian Rockies – was profound in that I learned more about my connection with nature and how to be content with my own company. But it was the promise of meeting new people that got me almost running back to civilization.
The greater irony was that I knew more about that continent and its people than the one I had lived on for almost 30 years. It’s the reason I now focus wholeheartedly on travelling in Africa.
Travel only to learn more about ourselves and we travel in a vacuum. If we look outwards rather than inwards and engage with people, we learn more about the world. But we also learn more about ourselves that way, more than we’ll ever learn just gazing at our own navel.
