Travel - Living Life

'Travelling is like flirting with life'. How better can this urge to explore the unknown, to seek and learn be explained? What is it that makes some people want to travel so much? Across continents and oceans just to be somewhere. Why do they do it? Is it a need to find new ideas? New experiences? A sense of fulfillment? A promise? Beauty? Love? These reasons might sound absurd to those who have bound themselves to their corner of this unbelievably huge universe. They stand inside the boundaries that they have created for themselves, never straying far. But I wonder if they ever peep over those walls because I really cannot believe that there is a single person in existence who does not want to see and feel what he has never felt before or at the least harbor a small amount of curiosity to what lies beyond. There are people who undertake life changing journeys knowing that they would never be the same again and then there are those who stumble into one, surprised at what they become in retrospect. In fact there are all kinds of travelers. The true joy of traveling lies in the journey as much as in the destination. It is an unmatched feeling in its own to experience a new culture, to savor something exotic, to be in a place or a phenomenon that you have always read about, to feel it happen around you for real. I believe that the feeling that u revel in at that moment is worth every bit of your effort. Why is there a need for beauty if it is not indulged in? Why do things beautiful and terrible exist if not for the sole purpose of being experienced? A true traveler is the one who takes pleasure in what he experiences and where his feelings are truly his own and not born out of a requirement to do so. No matter how short a journey might seem it always changes something in you, it always does. Some wise guy once said if you are not willing to be changed by a place then there is no point going. The world is a very beautiful place. Man has explored it for centuries and yet there is so much left to be discovered. To me life is a gift to experience the beauty that permeates everything around us. The true essence of which is captured in D. H. Lawrence's words, 'Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.'