ONE WAY TICKET – How Traveling Will Change Your Life

I bought a one-way ticket to London.

That’s how it all started. I was living in Los Angeles for my last semester of college, slowly chipping my way into the film industry and feeling pretty content with my life and then one day, I bought a one-way ticket to London. It seems as random as that looking back…

I do know that for as long as I can remember I had dreamed of doing just that. Every fight with my parents, every middle-school bully, every high-school woe found me tucked away in some corner plotting my escape to a bigger world. Every excruciating, late-night study session in college was fueled by daydreams of foreign lands where tests and projects could never touch me. And every heartbreak was balmed by the knowledge that someday, I’d be far away — going places some people would never dare to go and somehow that made me feel larger than the painful life around me.

So as random as it seems looking back, I know there must have been something that sparked the impulse. Something that made me feel trapped or helpless, just as I had countless times before only this time — for the first time — there was possibility. This time I had nothing tying me down that wouldn’t be there when I got back…

And so I lept.

And it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

But not in the way I thought it would be.

Traveling will change your life. It will change you. It will broaden your mind, make you a more understanding person and it will make your life sweeter. But it is not an escape from your problems. Your conflicts with people back home will be entrenched by the distance. Your conflicts with yourself will be highlighted and expanded. Your relationship with your faith, ideals, and worldview will be challenged and broken. And at the same time, you will spend just as many hours bored or unimpressed or restless or trapped as you would have back home.

Traveling is not the magic potion I thought it would be. I didn’t “find myself” in Europe. I didn’t even find fulfillment in Europe. I found more pieces of the puzzle called life.

So yes, traveling changed my life.

And yes, I still spend days dreaming up trips overseas… but not in the same way that I used to. Because I know now the consequences of stepping out of your hometown into a bigger world. That life doesn’t stop when you leave the US. That heartache, adventure, boredom, loneliness, and love is everywhere, always and we’ll taste them all wherever we are.