I started traveling when I was in college. For better or for worse, I am a terribly curious person who wants to know, comprehend, and experience various things, situations, and people. I crave to know how people live in other parts of the world. I have never looked at traveling as mere pastime or vacation, but instead, I see it as an intensive process of learning that happens on many different levels, consciously and unconsciously. When you see and delve into diverse ways of life, new traditions, and unfamiliar standards of human behavior, or when you ponder upon what a culture has built, created, and prioritized, you often pause, because you are surprised or do not understand, or perhaps do not agree with what you see. Observing the behavior of representatives of other cultures, can lead you to experience a wide range emotions from admiration of certain aspects to hatred of other values, when they contradict your system of values. 

Both the positive and negative emotions generated by traveling are extremely useful because they invite you to start questioning everything: your beliefs, goals, interests, and more than anything else, your interpersonal relationships. I know this because it happened to me so many times. A lot of that questioning experience was actually rather painful because it forced me to start my life from scratch so many times. At this point, only fragments of that process remain in my memory. One of the most vivid examples comes from my overall experience when I immigrated to the United States in 2002. It was really difficult to accept the fact that certain tastes, priorities, and life goals are completely different here. However, it helped me tremendously to see life and its meaning in a novel light. 

As a species, we are all extremely judgmental. Our judgement is completely built on our experience. It is something that Emmanuel Kant defined as knowledge a posteriori which is synonymous with empirical knowledge. The human mind seeks to explain everything it sees by building upon or connecting to previous knowledge, which inherently tends to be extremely subjective. Our knowledge is determined by geographical location, culture belonging, and individual experience. Therefore, in order to understand human life better, we need to increase and diversify our experience. If we always do the same things, surround ourselves with similar people, and follow the same routine, then our lives become very limited and repetitive. 

How does one engage in this process of reflective traveling?

I find it useful to have a list of countries, cities, or places that you want to visit. Each of us may have a very different list based on our personal life experiences. I created mine many years ago, but I keep modifying it so as to fit my own illusory ideas and perception of different parts of the world. My original list was solely based on books I read and fantasies I dreamed of as a child and teenager. I longed for visiting places where my favorite characters lived, breathed, fell in love, and sometimes even died. For the most part, I completed that list long ago, but now my list has evolved to contain places which I know almost nothing about. I want to see those distant lands in order to find answers for questions, even for those which I have yet to ask. I intentionally do not name any specific places here, out of respect for you, my reader, because you deserve to create your own list and follow your own vast and wondrous dreams. 

Olga Sylvia, PhD