IWillSeeTheWorld.com

It feels like I’m traveling on so many different levels. There’s the obvious one, where I’m physically moving around the planet, constantly seeing, tasting and hearing new things. But there’s more.

I’m traveling through the other travellers I meet. Daily I have conversations with people from far away, whose life path has crossed mine. I’ve met a guy on a two year journey around the world researching to write a book on spiritual contemporary art, a kid from Canada who decided to move to New Zealand and gave away everything he owned all in a matter of ten days and an English girl who was traveling with her mother in the safety of Singapore where mom wouldn’t let her go out alone at night, even though she had just come from a solo visit to the drug trafficking towns of South America. I met two girls from Jordan, that were surprised I’d even heard of their home since most they met have not, a model from Vancouver who’s walked runways and shot magazines in Italy, New York and Hong Kong and countless Germans and Australians on round the world journeys. One could simply sit in a hostel all day and by smelling the foods cooked, hearing the languages spoken and meeting all the guests that come in and out, feel as if they’re traveling the world.

It also feels as if I’m traveling throughout myself. Like I’m scouring the earth of my fears and desires. I’m realizing what I need and what’s important to me. I hardly ever think about the personal effects I left behind. When I do, they appear only as a pile of boxes. I can’t much remember what’s in them. I’ve even thought about giving everything away, but I realized I’m so disconnected from it already, that that’s not really necessary. It’s pretty freeing to know I don’t need any of that stuff to be happy.

Really, the only things I think about at home are the people I love. Everything else seems so distant and irrelevant now. I know I’m easily caught up in the race for financial success. I like challenge, I like competition and when I’m around it, I can’t help but get involved. Sometimes I miss the excitement of working, but traveling itself can be like a job at times. It gets tiring to spend everyday chasing sights and culture, taking pictures, writing and constantly meeting new people. Travel burnout is a well known ailment to which downtime, or vacation from traveling, is the best defense.

Another type of travel I’m excited to be on is the spiritual kind. For a multitude of reasons, I dropped from the face of faith in anything some years ago. Lately I’ve been trying to sail on the winds of chance and fate as much as possible. Doing so has opened my mind to some things that were easy to ignore before. It’s a difficult struggle to overcome the ways I’ve defined truth all my life, but I’m intrigued and looking for more.

All these things make the reasons for traveling an endless list. It’s so much more than seeing the world. No matter how cliché’ it sounds; it really is about seeing myself too.

One upside to doing this website is that I have a larger audience, which is forcing me to get better at writing and photography. I had been holding back from posting my more personal thoughts, but realized a very large part of my travels were thus being left out. So I’ve decided to let it flow more, to let you inside my head. That’s where it feels like I’m doing most of my traveling anyway.