How Not To Become An Armchair Traveler

Written on December 3, 2007 by Tezza

Monday’s weekly guide to Travel and Recreation from 4EvaYoung.com

In Chapter 2 of “Vagabonding” Rolf starts the chapter by recounting a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about seventeen hundred years ago.

“In the tale, a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucious shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they’d made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucious learned to “mock their temptations” by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, “We will leave in the winter.” When the winter came, they said, “We will leave in the summer.” They went on like this for over fifty years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows.

Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows – but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoureau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”

If your sick of being an armchair traveler watching travel shows but never really seeing those stunning places yourself or listening to friends and family returning excited from trips abroad then here are some simple suggestions to stop being an observer and become the experiencer:

1. Your A Fool To Wait
There is never a perfect time to travel. If you are waiting to save up more money, waiting on the world to become a little safer or maybe your waiting for the time to make itself available then you might just be waiting for a very long time. Travel might not be the highest priority on your mind right now and thats okay. But if on the other hand your constantly dreaming about travel then waiting maybe a fast road to disappointment later in life. You can never predict what the future holds. Maybe your health starts to fade, maybe your commitments or circumstances change. If you have the health, the means and the ability to travel right now then why not take the chance now. The idea that you can always travel later in life holds one big assumption and that is that your still around and able to travel later.

2. You Can Always Find a Way
Aaron from Today Is That Day wrote about his trip to St Pete Beach.

“I have been to St. Pete Beach several times in my life, and I know how wonderful it is there. However, I almost didn’t even go on this trip. To say that I had to jump through hoops to pull off the mini-vacation would be an understatement. As busy as I have been, and with all of the loose ends that I needed to tie up before I could leave, not to mention financing the trip itself, I almost decided not to go. As it turns out, that would have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life!”

“Once I decided that I was going to go on the trip no matter what, I knew I had to find a way to make it happen. I stayed up late working, I got up early, I turned down invitations to social events, I even did hard manual labor outdoors for 8-10 hours at a time as part of the preparation for the trip. I made up my mind that I wanted to go, and from that point on it wasn’t a matter of if I was going, it was only a matter of finding a way. The lesson? There is always a way, if you want something bad enough.”

3. Play Tourist In Your Own Home Town

Travel doesn’t have to be this big event that involves you seeing some far away distant land. Travel can be just as easily done in your own backyard. It’s always interesting to me how little of my own country I’ve seen. Most of what I have seen is when I’m either taking friends and relatives around or when I make an active decision to take time out and just be a tourist in my own backyard. We have this sense that travel domestically isn’t really quite traveling at all. We want that big excitement factor and maybe in the back of our minds the “grass is always greener on the other side.” We take our own country for granted that it will always be here when we want to see more of it, but it can also prove the best stomping ground to get your travel interests started. Consider taking a weekend to drive somewhere that you’ve never been before. Visit the tourists sites that you have admired but never quite gotten around to visiting yet.

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Posted in Travel and Recreation