Traveling is a lot of things. It’s liberating — you are no longer confined by the self and circumstances of your everyday life. It can be affirming and meaningful, revealing parts of yourself you might never encounter in your regular world.
Traveling is a break — a moment outside of regular time — giving you, or you and your travel companions, friends, or family, a chance to reconnect, fall back in love, and remember what really matters.
Like I said, it’s a lot of things. But it can also be scary.
Then again, a lot of life is scary — or can be. But something about being far from home, in a place where you may not speak the language fluently or know how to get help, can leave you feeling even more vulnerable.
I remember a time on the Tube in London, when a man got on at Piccadilly, acting strangely. He carried a large bag in a suspicious way, and it made me uneasy. I recalled something a London friend once told me: If someone makes you uncomfortable on the Tube, just get off and take the next one. Everyone at the table had agreed: not worth the risk. Could be a bomb… or a nutter. A nutter with a bomb. They all nodded. So, I got off.
Was there a Tube bombing that day? No. But I was nervous the rest of the ride.
A year or so ago in Spain, our hybrid car died on the motorway. Cars sped past, the nearest station was far away, and apparently in Spain, one does not simply get out and fill up a gas can like we might in the U.S. When we asked, we were told it wasn’t allowed. Thankfully, we had paid extra for roadside assistance, but the hour we waited was nerve-wracking — especially with a child in the car.
That’s when traveling started to feel different — more frightening, more fragile — after my son was born. You begin to notice everything: the armed soldiers patrolling tourist sites, the strangers who stare a little too long, the endless what-ifs that creep into your mind.
What if someone drives a van into this market? What if a madman with a knife or gun walks by? What if this beautiful vacation turns into a nightmare?
But of course, bad things can happen anywhere. There are dangerous, hateful, broken people everywhere — at home, abroad, on trains, in churches, in parks.
But there are also helpers. Always, there are helpers.
The waiter who stopped a man from stealing my mother’s purse in Italy. The woman who smiled reassuringly as my child cried on a plane. The tow truck driver in Spain who let my son’s stuffed animal “help drive” us to the service station. The man who ran to carry my bags on my first solo trip with my son in Europe — then sternly told the cab driver not to overcharge me while I stood there, exhausted, anxious, and grateful.
“We can’t be afraid of the world if we want to move through it, learn from it, and find ourselves in it.”
If we look a little deeper — beyond what is frightening, foreign, or unknown — we’ll find a world still full of kindness, goodness, and connection.
Traveling reminds me of that. Every time I go somewhere new, I fall back in love with the world — not because it’s perfect or safe, but because even in its uncertainty, it’s still beautiful.
