2 days ago
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The New Year is almost upon us. It’s always a moment to celebrate change and hope, and this year, 2025, at the quarter century mark, it seems even more of a change point than usual. It’s a world in change, and there’s no better way to appreciate it, participate in it, learn about it and get up to speed with it than to travel. It’s one of the best ways to expand one’s range of vision of the totality of possibilities.
In 1999, I still found it hard to imagine saying a date that started with “2000” instead of “19-” something. January 1, 2000, would usher in not only a new century, but a new millennium, a concept I found impossible to grasp. Then when the calendar did turn over to 2000, and the dreaded Y2K crash failed to materialize, it felt like we had ridden the 20th century into the 21st without a bump, a smooth transition. Those of us born and raised in the 20th century could have been forgiven for thinking that nothing much had changed, at least not overnight.
Now, we are a quarter of the way to the 22nd century. And there’s no doubt that it is a vastly different world from that of the 1900s. Listing all the ways our world has changed would be a big project. Now, memories of 1999 seem quaint indeed. Pre-social media, pre-iPhone, etc., etc. – how did we live then? Of course we try to drag that world with us into the 21st century. That’s normal. As Marshall McLuhan put it, we head into the future looking at the rear-view mirror. We want to hold on, but time is fleeting and resists attempts to hold it back. And clearly, the pace of change continues to accelerate.
There’s a feeling of change in the air. There’s a sense that we don’t know exactly what is coming, but we know it will be different. The attitudes we take towards it will shape the way we experience it. So, I am holding onto high expectations.
Travel is always changing. Events will determine that you can travel to this place now, but not that place. But in another sense, travel is constant, in that the human desire for travel seems more unquenchable than ever. Everything that happens as we progress through history seems to drive that hunger even harder. Though the COVID pandemic depressed travel for more than a year, in the long run it seems to have only intensified the passion for travel, and its importance to people. Nothing suppresses that urge. Everything only deepens it. We are a migrating species and we love to travel.
It seems that people like me, whose minds were formed in the 20th century, need to embrace change so as not be overtaken by it. And when we do, it’s exciting. And there is no better way to get into the spirit of change than to travel. Travel is change. To me that is self evident. It’s good practice for adapting to change, for encountering the previously unknown, and then accommodating it into our new, enlarged world view.
When you travel, you experience change on many levels simultaneously. You are thrust into a world that is changed from top to toe, so that instead of just noting the differences, you are making note of the few things that are actually the same as you are used to at home.
Returning to a place where you have been before presents the change in bold relief, and you find that you can never return to the same place. Time is a river, and the place in your memory is way upstream.
I came upon a lecture recently called “The Totality of Possibilities” by the late Louise Hay, a writer of books about positive thinking that were on the New York Times Bestsellers List for more than 20 years straight. The basic idea of her presentation was that of all the possibilities there are, we human beings see only a small sliver of what is possible in any given situation. Stretching our minds to see a broader range of what is possible gives us great advantages. It makes us smarter, enhances our insight and expands our capacity for enjoyment. Travel provides all sorts of opportunities to learn new things, and to have fun doing it.
Travel is encountering new things, being presented with new ways of doing practically everything in a foreign country, from the way people dress, talk and dance to the kinds of food on the grocery store shelves. A trip to a new place presents many of the kinds of mental exercises that brain specialists recommend for maintaining good brain health. These are some of the best things about travel. It’s one of the best things for your overall health and wellbeing, physical, mental and spiritual. And it’s fun.
Even if you ever found the learning experience in school to be drudgery, the kind of learning you get out on the road is not dull. That kind of learning you don’t have to be force fed. You go after it eagerly like a child for whom the whole world is new. There is no better and more enjoyable way to learn, expand and dive into the dynamic of change than to travel.
I can’t imagine how my life would have been different if I had not had my one chance to travel to Mexico when I was 16. I grew up in Kansas, far from the oceans, the mountains, the big cities, far from practically everything. As a kid I didn’t have the means to travel much beyond my hometown. The first time I got out of the country was a trip just over the border from Tucson, Arizona, to Nogales, Mexico, with my sister’s Spanish teacher. That was the first time I experienced total immersion in another culture. And it was as if someone put an electrode on my toe and lit up my whole body with a powerful electric current. Being immersed in an environment where everything is different created an instant, fundamental change in me, a metanoia.
If you asked what was different, I would say, “What wasn’t different?” Everything. The colored lights, the Mexican mariachi music, the food, the buildings, everything. There wasn’t really much of anything that was familiar. It just lit me up like a Christmas tree, and I don’t suppose I ever got over it, because I’m still seeking that experience as much as possible. Without that trip, who knows? Maybe I never would have learned how great travel is.
Until you have an experience like that, the word “culture,” in the anthropological sense, has no meaning. It’s the idea that a fish has no concept of water because it has no experience of not-water. Water is the total medium in which its world exists. Until you’ve experienced another culture, you have no idea what a culture is. You don’t understand that most of what you experience is filtered through your culture. You are enveloped in a cultural world view.
The French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that traveling provides “this inexorable glimpse of existence as it is during those few lucid hours, so exceptional in the span of human time, when you are leaving the customs of the last country behind and the customs of the next one have not yet got their hold on you.”
So for me, I hope to travel a lot next year. It’s a good time to travel, I think, to see the world, to feel like a citizen of the world, to experience the great variety of different cultures and landscapes, and the changes they are all going through. I am ready to go.
Your humble reporter,
A. Colin Treadwell
English (US) · 