Written by Irina-Stefana Chiriac

 Student at Technical College ‘Mihai Bacescu’ from Falticeni, Romania

Traveling is wonderful in many ways. It makes us happy by discovering so many new places, people, food… As wonderful as it is, many people think they should wait until their later years to start experiencing and to explore.  But waiting is not always the best option.

Of course, traveling has a lot of benefits like finding a new purpose: by being exposed to new people, cultures and lifestyles you may find out about new interests you weren’t aware you have. You will be more opened to new insights, ways of seeing the world and living, which often gives people a new purpose in their lives.

You realize how little you knew about the world and that concepts are different to experiences. Things you heard about the world may end up being so different to what we were indoctrinated to believe. We have the whole world to learn about with every place we discover, person we meet or culture we experience.

One of the best things is making a lot of new friends: people are actually nicer than we think and by traveling, we discover so many types of them. The feeling of getting a new friendship and realizing we all share similar needs is awesome. Something magical happens when people turn out to be more raw and real outside of their conditioned environment and when they feel open to express themselves without feeling judged.

When traveling so much, you start appreciating your home more and realize this is more than just a place where you grew up. Spending a lot of time away, in some cases in places where we don’t have the luxuries we got at home (like villages that run out of electricity) makes us appreciate what we have. Also, the more we travel, the more we realize that ‘home’ is not just the town or the city we have grown up in; ‘home’ represents the whole world, becoming conscious of the harmonious life we could have supporting each other.

Last but not least, we realize life is a great gift: by traveling, we become overwhelmed with so much appreciation for the beautiful moments and the people we enjoyed them with. So, the last thing to say is that rather than waiting with the thought ‘I wish I had done that’, we better live the moment, take action and be proud while saying ‘I am glad to have done that’.