We no longer travel because it is the best way to go abroad. We travel, initially, to get lost; and then we travel to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers can accommodate. We travel to carry what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the world whose riches are dispersed differently. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again, to slow down time, to be fooled, and to fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, even before people began to fly frequently, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” Sometimes we “need,” wrote the Harvard philosopher, “to escape into open loneliness, aimlessness, the moral feast of taking some sheer risk, in order to sharpen the edge of life, savor difficulties, and be forced to work. desperately for a moment no matter what. “
Few of us forget the connection between “traveling” and “labor pains,” and I know that I travel largely in search of difficulties, both my own, which I want to feel, and others, that I need to see. Traveling in that direction guides us towards a better balance of wisdom and compassion, of seeing the world clearly and yet truly feeling it. Because seeing without feeling can obviously be indifferent; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
We must travel for the following reason.
For health
For education
Get away from things
