CAGED WANDERER
I’ve always had a heart full of wanderlust. I’ve always wanted to go anywhere and everywhere, soak up the cultural atmosphere, see historical places, learn about other peoples and their way of life. However, I never really had the chance. Growing up, it was difficult to find time or a way to get out of my home state, much less go further than that.
My first trip outside the United States was to Mexico when I was 19. Before leaving, I was thrilled. I thought, “Here’s my chance!” Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the experience. Not that I wasn’t grateful that I had the opportunity to go, or that I didn’t adore the people with me, or anything like that. It was just a purely touristy experience, and it didn’t leave me with a sense of what that part of the world was truly like. After my lackluster trip to Central America, I visited places in the United States like Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, New Orleans, and Chicago and loved things I saw and did in each city. Still, I continued to feel like I was only a tourist and none of those places resonated with me or left a lasting, emotional impression.
I didn’t know what I was doing wrong—I had read a lot of stories about how traveling, even in one’s own country, can change you and be such a powerful experience that it actually gives you a new perspective on life in general.
Then, in the spring of 2017, I went through my first semester of Mississippi State’s Montgomery Leadership Program. When I first began the program, I remember thinking, “How much can this really impact me?”
SPOILER ALERT: IT DID IMPACT ME.
Throughout that semester, I was shown that I had shut myself off from everything emotionally due to some heartbreaks and betrayals over the formative years of my life and that it was preventing me from connecting to things that could change me. At first, I thought that was just relationships with people. I even wrote two reflection papers that semester on how my fellows in the program and the children in the after-school program with which I was partnered for my service learning had touched my heart in a way it hadn’t been in nearly a decade. And it was all true, I was a different person. My whole outlook on my relationships with others had been transformed.
It wasn’t until I went down to New Orleans with a friend at the beginning of that following summer that I thought, “Oh. This is different.” I had been to NOLA multiple times before—it’s only two hours from where I grew up—but this time, the city spoke to me. It whispered words that sounded a lot like jazz music, and I knew. I knew that my experiences from now on would never be the same. I would no longer be a tourist when going somewhere new. I would truly be a traveler, a wanderer, finding pieces of home in places I had never been before.
Later that summer, I went to the United Kingdom. It was my first time leaving my home continent, and I was nervous because I wondered if this would finally be my “aha!” moment, the one that gave me the life-changing, perspective altering experience I had read about. As soon as I stepped foot in the Manchester airport I was fully aware that I wouldn’t be who I was when I returned to that same airport two weeks later.
I spent sixteen glorious, whirlwind days in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. I met the most delightful people, saw some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes I had seen to date, and saw where Queen Elizabeth I was buried. I looked for the monster in Loch Ness, saw the house that inspired Pemberley in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, ate lunch at the pub where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien talked about life and literature with the other Inklings, hiked along the coast of the Mourne Mountains, and I had never felt more gloriously alive in my entire life. It was as if I had been asleep for twenty-three years, and suddenly I was awakened by the most golden of sunshiny days streaming through my window.
My heart had been opened, and the wanderer inside of my chest was rejoicing at being set free. Ever since then, I’ve been ready to jet-set anywhere at the drop of a hat. I went to California a month after I got back from the United Kingdom, and then two months after that I went to North Carolina and New York City back to back. For my spring break, I went to Colorado to experience a week surrounded by purple mountain majesty. Each of these trips has filled in a new puzzle piece into the mosaic of who I’m meant to be.
I spent years wondering why traveling wasn’t helping me become a better person like so many people had told me it would. I never stopped to question what was going on in my heart and my mind that could be preventing a soulful transformation from happening.
So, my advice to anyone and everyone is this:
Travel. Everywhere, anywhere, far and near, and do it as often as you can.
BUT.
Do some serious self-reflection first. Don’t go somewhere and be a tourist. Allow your heart and your mind to be open. Allow yourself to feel and hear what the city or country you’re visiting has to teach you. Prepare for each journey with thoughtful consideration. Only then will traveling truly transform you.
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