Traveling is a refreshing and rejuvenating experience one could take an advantage of. The atmosphere change, the way of living, the different culture and the ins and outs of it all help shape our mind. It is beneficial to see the other side of the world mainly to grow a branch of creative thinking, the tools to understand others and to learn something new. Traveling is a way to expand beyond what we are familiar with; it pushes us to move out of our comfort zones in which will grow overtime.
As I was waiting for my delayed flight to Boston from Toronto a couple of days ago, it came to my mind the irony of life and how every situation we ever stumble upon mean something more than we think. Traveling, I thought, could be more like going through the changes that life brings to us. There will be times where we get lost, much like I did, almost all the time in the rapid transit of Ontario. There will be times where we walk more than we should have only to realize we went too far ahead to make it back to your destination. Or that ‘‘streetcar” we were waiting for doesn’t even come to the place we were so sure of. All we know is we have been waiting there for too long and nothing seems to make sense. We all have heard of, “When life brings you lemons…” but sometime life brings us tangerines, depending on the season. Maybe, the wasted time we spent waiting for that “streetcar” that never came was the bridge we had to cross to meeting the person that could become a lifetime friend in a foreign place.
Sometimes, the wrong street we walked towards turns out to be an opportunity to a new set of discoveries. Maybe the highway we thought about crossing, but didn’t saved our lives from a car wreck that happened while we crossed on the wrong direction. Ironically, the two-hour delay at the airport, that made me frustrated and that I thought was a setback for me writing this article on time turned out to be what produced this very article.
Life, more like travailing, is a set of trials and errors. We get lost, we ask for help and guidance, sometimes we get played and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes, we figure out where to go and how to get there by ourselves and sometimes we give up. This is to affirm that we could learn to see the setbacks as a setup for something greater. For a greater purpose that will serve us abundantly in the long run, such as a new set of creative thoughts or a redirection from our routine in life. At times, traveling, in the sense of going through seasonal changes in life could become a place where we feel we never arrive. But at least we know we are standing on our destination. Keep in mind that traveling is all about rearranging, discovering, learning and moving forward. Where is your next destination?