Is Travel the Answer?

A wee little travel essay I was asked to write as a guest article to a University publication

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” Samuel Johnson

To so many people, travel is seen as a method of running away. Of avoiding reality and shunning our societal and moral responsibilities. In short, it’s merely a self-indulgent, short-term endeavour that’ll eventually come to an end. And with that end, we’ll return to ‘reality’ with a sharp kick, to sadly set off exactly where we left off a few months earlier. In the words of Elizabeth Drew, “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”

Now, although this may be a fair assessment of many backpackers and travellers the world over, it’s a long-shot from truly explaining the rationale and motivation behind much wandering vagabondism.

For so many poor lost souls out there, the country they grow up in is too small a pond to enable one to truly appreciate what needs to be appreciated. The restrictions set forth by individual cultures can all too easily close the mind off to alternative, and more positive thought modes.  As D. Runes once said; “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home”.

Screw it Let’s Do it.

Deciding to overcome the heavy, miserable weather, and just get on with it! So I went for a run….

Today’s just been ‘one of those days’. Dark, grey, ominous clouds outside. Constant, fine drizzle and pedestrians sauntering miserably through crestfallen streets.

You know what I mean. Those days that make you want to sit and wallow in your own self-pity, huddled in a duvet longing for some rays of light to penetrate the sky. Any rays. Please. PLEASE! Even if it’s just one or two…

Problem is, you see, I live in Southport. 70% of the bloody time it’s ‘one of those days’. But today I snapped. I’d had enough. So I took matters into my own hands.

What did I do? That’s right. I turned to my bookshelf, as you do. And just before I gave up my search for something interesting to read to return to my wallowing, an old book by Richard Branson caught my eye.

I didn’t pull it down to read. I just spied the title; Screw it, Let’s do it!’.