You say travel is uncomfortable, I say travel is empowering.
With the prospect of travel comes the common dread of exhaustion and discomfort, for most people. When people are confronted with an upcoming voyage, they focus on the negative characteristics of travel. The main themes are the irritation of being cramped into various forms of transportation besides luggage and the hours of boredom staring out a blurry window.
There is a positive side to travel that is hardly acknowledged. Travel has a deep emotional effect when you overlook the physical effects.
After traveling, I feel a sense of empowerment It is hidden underneath the physical sensations of cramped legs and a queasy stomach, but it is present. Effortlessly gliding across the highway or a blue sky communicates a sense of ability to me.
When you reflect on the miles covered, you cannot help feeling powerful. A glance at a pen-traced map inspires a sense of triumph. The sense of empowerment increases as I approach my destination, which is the final goal of my pursuit. The farther the distance I travel, the greater the sense of empowerment I experience. A faraway location appears at first to be unreachable so when travel eliminates this gap it creates a sense of achievement.
The entire world appears to be within reach after a long travel. Traveling gives you the power to reach any corner of the world if you so desired. Even though you are not going to travel to every part of the world, a five-hour drive still gives you a taste of that authoritative ability.
This sense of empowerment is what develops, for many people, a love of travel. This love may evolve into an addiction, where the person craves this sense of power and must constantly be planning a new trip. It is not the act of visiting a new location that is addictive, but the energizing feeling of actually trekking towards that location.
Most people do not recognize this empowerment, as a result of the frequency of their travels. They take for granted the availability of such facilitating transportation, so they do not comprehend how inaccessible destinations would be without the resource of transportation.
Also, people focus on the destination rather than the travel, seeing it only as an annoying necessity. Consider the means rather than the destination to experience the empowerment that travel can entitle.
