In the corporate world — gag, I know — “work-life balance” has recently become a buzz phrase. From global companies like Facebook and Google to forward-thinking local businesses, ideas like working from home, having professionally-cooked lunches and even adult nap time are becoming the rule, rather than the exception.
So why am I mentioning these fun facts on a blog about making travel your lifestyle?
See, when travel becomes your “life,” it takes the place of “work” in the above equation. While some may argue that travel is about losing yourself, about letting go with wild abandon and picking up the pieces later, I believe travel should be an active quest to find yourself. Frankly, if travel doesn’t help you live your everyday life better, you’re doing something wrong.
Travel With Intent
One of the saddest sights I encounter on the road is other travelers who’ve atrophied, as I like to term it. Whether they’ve become content to dance each and every night away until they have no more money or exist completely within the confines or a hotel or hostel from sunrise to sunset, at least a few of the fellow travelers I meet everywhere I visit seem not to be traveling at all, but rather flagellating aimlessly in a country where they don’t happen to have citizenship.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a good day (or week!) at the beach. You should absolutely build time into your travel schedule for relaxation. The problem I find is that if relaxation doesn’t serve a purpose — for example, to alleviate weeks or months of hard work back at home or to reward yourself for making a long, overland journey across a continent — then I don’t see it as serving much purpose.
To be sure, there’s a huge difference between checking into an Indian ashram with the intent of meditating and sitting at your hostel’s rooftop bar because you aren’t inclined do anything. That difference is, well, intent.
Although traveling without intent might seem obliviously blissful when you’re in the midst of it, you’ll return home feeling like you’ve never left. You’ll spend your days restless and miserable, longing for your next vacation rather than applying what you learned from your last one to your life at “home” because let’s face it: You didn’t learn anything.
Stay Connected
When you travel, it’s easier than you might think to completely forget your life at home, particularly if you’re like me and don’t carry a cellphone on the road. Get to know each new person you encounter as fully as time and your energy levels allows (if you find yourself in Brazil, this will probably be on a rather intimate level), but do your very best to maintain at least occasional contact with your friends and family.
I’ve been out of the United State for my mother’s past three birthdays, yet have managed to call her (at a time she’s actually awake, I’m proud to say) no matter whether I was in India, China or Chile. Likewise, I make sure and send at least one communication per week to each of the people I consider to be my friends, even if it’s a simple emoticon sent across Facebook Chat. I even managed to donate $20 to my friend Kristen’s “Walk for Alzheimers” when I was in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula last September.
If you take even a second of your time to let your friends and family know you’re thinking of them when you’re out on the road, it makes them feel loved, important and best of all, that you’re still a part of their lives. I can tell you from experience that some people in your life will essentially have forgotten you by the time you return if you don’t at least minimally stay in contact.
Now, this isn’t generally out of malice, but stems from a more pragmatic source. It’s simple, really: If you are absent in someone’s life long enough, they will fill the space you held with other people and things, not to shun you but to keep themselves happy. If you don’t occasionally remind the people in your life of how important they are to you, you may find upon returning that they’re no longer in your life very much.
Don’t Travel Too Much
After passing through immigration at Houston Intercontinental Airport upon completion of my trip to South America last spring, I encountered an advertisement for a Continental Airlines credit card I already held. No one says “I take too many vacations,” it read. Although I doubt anyone has actually uttered those words, seeing the advertisement got me thinking: Is it possible to travel too much? Within seconds, I knew that the answer was an unequivocal “Yes,” even if I didn’t specifically feel that way myself.
Travel, it goes without saying, is defined by adventure and accomplishment, by journeys and destinations one after another and (hopefully) by frequent encounters with people and places you never knew existed. The negative side to this constant upside is that it can be difficult for your “real life” to compare. This is what’s known as the “post-travel blues.”
As someone who’s spent years cultivating location-independent income (which, if you’re curious, is mostly really, really boring commercial Web writing), I can just about travel whenever I want and about as often as I want. I choose not to, however, because I think it’s essential to reflect for at least a few weeks on what traveling has taught you and how it’s changed you, and to spend at least a few weeks after that applying what you’ve learned and how you’ve changed not only to your only life, but to use do whatever you can to help others find peace and satisfaction in theirs.
I think this quote from Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, one of my very favorite travel books, sums it up perfectly:
When you’ll have found blissfulness in the forest, then come back and teach me to be blissful.
If you don’t come back and stay long enough, how can you enjoy your blissfulness or teach anyone to be blissful?
Relax After You Get Home
As I alluded to a few paragraphs up, relaxation should never define your entire travel experience. Likewise, you shouldn’t think of heading home as “getting back on the grind.”
Indeed, something I think most people fail to realize is that even the most leisurely of travel is work. Whether it’s before-dawn wake-up calls for early trains in India, biking through the Andean foothills so you can get your Malbec on or simply living day-in and day-out in a place where the nutrition is of lower quality than you’re used to, travel requires constant, active engagement unless you happen to be private jet-owning celebrity.
Rather than punishing yourself by working late every day your first week back, treat yourself to a massage or spa day. Don’t you dare stress about all the money you spent! Instead, be thankful that you got to spend it living your dream, rather than pissing it away at happy hour or on clothing you’ll never know you wanted.
Relaxation doesn’t have to be sedentary, either. Too tired to go on that 10-mile jog? Spend an hour or so compiling the best travel photos from your trip or sifting through the ticket stubs, advertisements and other paraphernalia you picked up every place you visited. Invite your travel companion over for a cup of coffee and get down to reminiscing business.
If you follow these simple steps, each trip you take will make you more adept at living the life you want wherever it is you call home.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
