Travel as Teacher — An Introspective Look on Changing Your Surroundings

Marius Miliunas
12 min readMar 15, 2019

Are you even aware why you’re feeling overworked, content, unmotivated, excited or any range of fluctuating emotions you perceive? Do you know why you hold onto your bad habit, knowing full well that it’s no good for you?If you do, then read no further. However, if you feel that life is riding you versus the other way around, or you feel helpless but to conform to this tempestuous way of life, then it’s likely because of your surroundings. In the last article, I discussed how the places we sleep, work, play, and eat influence, and sometimes, control us in subtle ways that we’re oblivious to. We all have our addictions, whether they’re healthy, psychological, physical, or figurative ones. The alcoholic who still keeps booze in the fridge will never break free from their addiction, if they always see it, no matter how hard they try to quit, though all is not hopeless. If we understand the cues that trigger our behavioral reactions, we can turn our situation around. If you’ve been in one place too long, you’re likely blind to what’s in front of you all the time. To reset our visual field, and all the other senses that go numb, we sometimes need to change our surroundings, to observe ourselves and how we react. In this article we’re talking about travel, not as an escape, but as a school of introspection.

Rethink Travel

We need a new definition of travel. Why? Because the mainstream definition of travel is narrow and elitist. It’s restricted to those who have money for it, and this type of travel drains the authenticity out of charming cities, in the name of entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. Downtown Amsterdam and Barcelona are my examples. They’re no longer what they were before travel got so cheap. This rampant belief that you’re entitled to go anywhere where a cheap RyanAir flight will take you is ignorant of the effects it has on these destinations. They’re basically herding semi-conscious animals with passports and deep wallets to exploit these places, deposit their feces and leave. Ok, that might be a little extreme, but it’s degraded travel to an unconscious activity where we don’t take into account our impact on the environment and vice versa.

Ask millennials what it means to travel nowadays. They’ll likely mention a plane, an exotic location, a hotel, and/or a packaged adventure. Everything is painted through the lens of money, convenience, and comfort. Since the industrial age, we’ve become increasingly conscious about efficiency and getting places faster so much so that Ubers and planes have become the commonplace, if you can afford it. Travel in the modern sense caters to those with too much money and not enough time.

Growing up, I never had much money, so it seemed ludicrous that I could ever be a traveler, except for two-week stints. I needed a more inclusive definition of travel, built on the resources we all have, because the truth is, you don’t need money to be a traveler, you need to rethink travel.

Before you rethink travel, you need to ask yourself „Why do I want to travel?“ You may think you know, but if you haven’t traveled much, you’ll likely only find out by traveling. Not knowing is a perfectly acceptable answer. In this article, I attempt to tackle the „Why,“ with a reason: to introspect; to learn about yourself, how I react to different environments and how they change me, my mood, and my health.

To allow travel to help you fulfill this goal, traditional mainstream travel is not effective, as that type of travel is all about comfort, convenience, and hedonism, all while trying to be exotic. If you travel with the internet glued to your wrist and you hold expectations for wherever you go, it will be hard to hold such a diametrically opposing definition for travel, that I propose. This other definition I call Alternative Travel (AT).

Alternative Travel

To travel is to flow down stream. You can run or drive to the delta, but then you’re just commuting.

At it’s heart, Travel’s about the going, not about the arriving. The destination’s unimportant because it’s always changing. As soon as you reach one place, you have a new destination, even if it’s to go back home. And if you don’t, then you’re not traveling anymore (however, for the sake of introspection, I include living abroad in this definition because then you’re traveling abroad). With that said, it’s time to rethink travel.

Alternative travel (AT) and mainstream travel (MT) lie on two opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re like Yin & Yang. The left and right hemispheres of our brains offer a fitting metaphor. MT is logical, time aware, and desires to control things, experiences, and outcomes. AT is ever present, intuitive, and creative. MT is all about control, which manifests itself as expectations. Expectations guarantee us a opportunity to be disappointed and surprised when they don’t match up, and they nullify the joy when things do turn out, albeit very rarely our we surprised because our expectations were exceeded. Because AT is about being in and accepting the present, there are no outcomes, only a constant stream of events that take up this moment. AT doesn’t have a concept of past or future, so that when something undesirable happens, it allows creativity to remedy the situation, hence it’s only undesirable if you try to control it by labeling it so.

The currency of AT is time, which is in abundance. There is no itinerary, no rush to be somewhere some-when. There’s no guarantee everything will be comfortable or will go smooth, but it offers life in its rawest. As for MT, the main currency is money. Everything is quantifiable. You can put a price on travel fares, lodging, food and secure it ahead of time, but you will pay a premium for it. An AT experience, on the other hand, is priceless. You can’t quantify an unexpected invitation to a family Christmas barbecue or an invitation to spend the night with a curious and amiable local.

It’s about seeing what’s on top of that hill, even if it means hopping a fence to get there.

AT is about emotion, MT is about expectation. MT encourages interacting with corporations and websites, AT encourages interacting with locals. Time is never enough in the MT mindset before you must return to system; it’s like hurrying to relax, because the free time is so finite. MT is for the herd mentality, the airport queues and security checks are the cattle pens we subject ourselves, because the system offers an illusion of control. AT is about freedom from the confines of having to be somewhere some-when, or travel in particular manner. It opens up the definition of travel to so much more.

Lessons from Discomfort

Where mainstream travel prioritizes predicting any of the discomforts of travel and running from them, AT prioritizes experiencing them when they come and learning from them. It returns to why you travel, if it’s to escape somewhere and disconnect, fear not, pretty soon they’ll have realistic virtual reality which can give you that experience. However, if you travel to live, learn, and make memories, you shouldn’t avoid all the hardships, otherwise you’re missing the joys that come from it. Worst of all, you’re **robbing** yourself of the chance to learn something. If you don’t believe me, consider the last time you traveled somewhere and it went without a hitch. What did you take from that experience that you’ll remember later on, what emotions can you recall, any lessons? I’ll tell you what I learned — nothing! Alan Watts describes it well when he says, „an experience you can predict is already in the past — you have already lived it.“ Deep down, don’t you want something novel?

To make travel your teacher, bring the type of awareness I talked about in the last article to your surroundings. When you arrive somewhere new, it might look as if you’re a passenger or passerby passing through, but it’s more than that. It’s a two-way interaction between you and the environment. When you’re aware of the environments you travel through, as well as your reaction and well-being, you connect with the place on a deeper level.
With this new definition in mind, you might wonder, „What do I do with it?“ It won’t mean shit if deep down inside you’re still tied to old beliefs. I don’t blame you, there are a number of travel myths that I myself held onto until I found AT.

The Biggest Myth of Travel

I’ll admit my definition is naive, idealistic, possibly impractical, and you’re skeptical it can’t be as simple as I claim. You come from a culture built on the claims of countless institutions that support on the belief and power of money, at least I do.

Countless cultures enforce this belief of money. My father fled from Communism in Lithuania, where scarcity was the norm, and even though I grew up in a world of excess and abundance, he instilled the notion that I didn’t have enough and I should work for more. There was no endgame, only how to get more. He taught to be stingy and to exploit the system so as to spend as little as possible. As soon as I had an income, I learned to scour the internet for travel deals and hacks to cheat the system, instead of actually traveling. Hence, I grew up like many, with this travel scarcity mindset, where you either do much research or pay a premium. What’s ludicrous as that spending several hundred dollars on a weekend sounded normal back then. If only I knew then how wasteful I was being with my money, and the time I spent working for it…

My belief that travel’s expensive persisted for several years, until I moved to Sri Lanka and Colombia for work. Money was tight, because I was living and working off my savings, thus I couldn’t travel like everyone else. I connected with an expat, who connected me with the locals. I ended up living with a Sri Lankan family in the jungle, or renting an apartment with two Venezuelans in Medellin. I learned that you will pay a fraction of the price when you veer off the mainstream.

Often times, the best options aren’t available on the internet, and you have to go out on your own. While all the other travelers I met stayed in hostels and went out to bars, I learned about the cultures I stayed with and learned to surf. I ate every meal with my hosts, they taught me their expressions, how they drink their tea (with TONS of sugar), and shared with me their homemade coconut deserts. My expenses in Sri Lanka and Colombia were minimal, especially once they taught me how to get around town like the locals do, and where to shop.

It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, in fact, it rained a lot. I had to put up with the hordes of mosquitoes, which found their way in my mosquito net and I often slept in sweltering heat without AC, but people live in far worse conditions every day. Those hardships taught me to appreciate a bedroom without whistling mosquitoes and all my western-world luxuries; these experiences toughened me up. Though I was living abroad then, it taught me that travel’s only expensive when you travel with a suitcase full of expectations.

Travel to Rid Yourself of Clutter

Life gets hectic. Responsibilities build up, appointments, errands and, events arise, and you also have laundry to do. It can feel suffocating as the clutter builds up to unnerve us. These are things we have only partial control over, and while you can employ techniques like meditation to come to terms, you can also use travel as a bootcamp to rid yourself of clutter. Learning to travel is learning to live with less. The constraints of travel are useful tools we can use to adapt our behavior; learning how to acclimate is essential and often more rewarding than not having the constraint. Travel limits how much you can carry, and in this day and age where we can store everything we’ve ever owned, we’re overly attached to unneccesary things. On the one hand, you might have all this value, on the other, this stuff is anchoring you down so you can’t leave for long, or you’re obligated to bring it with you. All this clutter immobilizes you.

Because you can’t bring your home with you, and the more you bring with you, the more things you have to keep track of, travel forces you to shed the things the extra weight that’s not essential. That’s a good thing, because the less you have, the less time, money, and energy you spend looking after it, the less it gets in your way, and the less things you have to lose! I’m proud to say that no matter whether I’m traveling or living somewhere, my whole life fits into a big backpack, thus organizing became easy. I might not be able to express my mood some days with a variety of clothes, but there’s countless other forms of expression besides clothing, furniture, and gadgets. Having so few belongings clears my room and my mind of clutter.

I’ve only vagabonding for a few years and what it’s taught me in minimal living has saved me time, stress, and made me a more mobile person. Within a weeks notice, it allowed me to move abroad to Germany without sacrificing anything. It comes with it’s own difficulties, however, that’s to be expected and hoped for, because it’s the difficulties we learn from. One of my difficulties is doing laundry, by hand twice a week, because I only own three pairs of shirts, socks, and underwear, I must do it often. Furthermore, your valuables age, and I only have one piece of clothing that doesn’t have holes in it, meaning I had to learn how to sow. On the flip side, I understand the true value of my belongings and I never have to think about what outfit to wear!

Go Abroad

If constant travel stresses you out, consider living abroad, if not just for a few months. The advantages are countless. It’s education, and not just the theoretical kind you learn in school, but the practical kind. It opens your perspective to other cultures with bizarre social norms. It teaches you to adapt, and accept that there have people living in ways you wouldn’t understand for as long as we’ve been conscious. Spending time abroad sheds light on the things you take for granted back home, when you no longer have them. The sheer fact of going somewhere foreign that you know little about rewards with an experience that builds confidence, and by experiencing the difficult and unfamiliar, it forces you to grow. Plus, it adds content to your life, encounters that will stay in memory until your old and can no longer travel physically. Memories last a lifetime, whereas money always fluctuates until you spend it, then it’s gone…

More Than One Way to Travel

To make Alternative Travel more alternative, we must consider all the different ways one can travel. When time no longer constrains us, we can choose to travel for the experience instead of the convenience and expedience. If you always travel by plane, bus, or car, then consider the alternatives. You could go by: ferry, ride by horse or camel, bike cross-country, hitchhike, kayak down river, walk a pilgrimage, sled with huskies, hike through nature with a backpack. I haven’t considered all the options and combinations, there are many, and they each offer a unique perspective of the environment as you pass through it. Compare that to a plane ride where you only see clouds. Be creative, be patient, and be open to whatever happens along the way.

There are many reasons to travel, and the truth is that you don’t even need to go far to benefit from it. Don’t be fooled by the belief that a journey’s not a journey unless you travel X number of miles from home. There are plenty of ways to get the highs of travel without going far, once you consider alternative ways to travel, and nearby destinations.

Lastly, lets consider the benefits to traveling locally: you get to know your area better, you meet new people establish connections with the people in and around your vicinity. Urban and suburban living forces people to live in such close proximity to one another, however, I can attest from living in both types of neighborhoods, I knew my immediate neighbors only superficially. Instead, I’d have to drive half an hour across town to have someone to hang out with. I was never curious enough back then to get to know the people around me, (nor were they to me) and I always traveled out of state and I overlooked all the treasure troves closer by. I recently started traveling around my country by bike, and for a country I thought I knew very well, I now realize I’ve only scratched surface. It’s radically changed my perspective of my country and it showed me that the people in my country are just like everywhere I’ve traveled, curious and human.

While we let the stress and clutter of the outside world build up its control on our lives and vie to go on vacation to let out some steam, remember that temporary fixes offer temporary solutions. If we want to restructure our lives to shed the things that bring us down and wear us out, we must learn what they are. Sometimes that involves displacing ourselves in a foreign environment and adapting to it. If we want our environment to cultivate us into our ideal selves, we need to bring awareness to ourselves within these environments.

There’s no doubt that we affect our surroundings, though not nearly as much as they mold us, thus it’s important to bring consciousness to the triggers in our environs that push and pull us. In this article I digressed into an alternative form of travel for you to entertain to help expose the nooks and crannies in your being. In the third and final article, I will offer insight on ways to change your surroundings, from the most intimate like your bedroom, to your neighborhoods.

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Marius Miliunas

Life coach, Fukuoka enthusiast, occasinal traveler and world citizen