The Why

Exploring various materials about round-the-world (RTW) trips, I realised that probably the first question that needs to be answered, RTW 101 so to speak, is the question – why. Why am I really doing this trip?

I must say that over time as my feelings about the trip ebb and flow, or I’m lost in the minutia of preparations and research, I feel at times that I’ve lost track of exactly why am I doing this.

I guess the most important reason for me of what I want to achieve on this trip is to push my boundaries. Not necessarily in the psychoanalytical sense – I mean, overcoming myself to do the very thing I abhor. (For an introvert and HSP like myself, I don’t need to go very far to get to a wildly uncomfortable situation – an evening of working the crowd will do!)

Rather, pushing the boundaries for me signifies this rare pleasure which you experience when you crack some new code, use some new opportunity you weren’t quite aware of, and – yes – touch down with your feet in a new country. So it’s less getting a task done and more getting to a revelation. And by definition where the revelation will come from is unknown and unknowable until it does come.

I guess the dream of a RTW trip also means the dream of freedom, not being bound by a 9-to-5 rhythm, by any rhythm really, by any obligation. The dream of boundless discovery.

Freedom does not mean emptiness. And so the dream is also to use the time to write, to photograph, to conceptualise, to reflect, to self-define.

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