REWIND Episode 143: How To Bring Back the Wonder of Travel

But this trip was so just nourishing to my soul, and I was reflecting on my way home on the plane and realized that the trip just left me with a lot of wonder and excitement and curiosity, which is what I wanna talk to you about today, how to feel and experience wonder from your vacation, especially when you've traveled a lot and the newness of travel has kinda worn off.

So before we arrived in Ecuador, um, I think maybe we were in the airport or somewhere, we were in transit, but my friends and I, we were just kinda chatting about what we were looking forward to the most from our itinerary, and one of my friends, she just kinda confessed that she felt kind of jaded and kind of, like, almost numb or dull with travel in general, where it felt kinda difficult for her to feel excited about a certain part of the trip, and I totally knew where she was coming from.

Now, I personally wasn't feeling that way at all, but I could definitely see how someone could feel that way when they have traveled a lot and taken a lot of trips.

And in the past she had traveled for work before, so airplanes kinda have this certain feeling for her.

And so I, I told her, I was like, "It's like your rose-colored glasses are gone." So in my travel style framework, one of the four confidence pieces of our travel styles is the eager traveler, and this is the one who naturally experiences a vacation through rose-colored glasses because they just haven't traveled much before or maybe not at all.

And so everything is like, "Wow, look at that." Everything is so new and so fresh and like you're looking through the eyes of a child.

So if you're pretty well-traveled, think back to that first trip abroad that you took.

I mean, do you remember how surreal everything seemed? Like you've just been transported to an entirely different world.

Like even for me, my first trip abroad was the UK, like not very different from home, right? But I could still notice, and I found myself in awe at all the little differences in customs and the accent, and then when riding the Tube, because Lord knows we don't have public transportation here in Texas, and, you know, driving on the opposite side of the road, and then the meters to feet conversion, and Marmite and Nutella.

[laughs] I mean, everything was just like, wow.

You just notice everything, and everything is so amazing to you, and you...

And it's just natural for you to feel that wonder.

But after those first few trips, or especially if you're exploring a region that you've been to before where the scenery maybe isn't something that you've, like, never seen before, or like me, I had been to South America and other Latin American countries many times before, and there are some general things that you kind of come to expect.

So once you're at that point in your travels, it's possible to start to lose some of that wonder and awe, just like as we grow from children to adults.

So when you've been to a few places and those rose-colored glasses are maybe a little bit more clear or maybe they're just totally gone, how do you bring back that awe and wonder again? So I have to give full credit to my other friend for answering this for us in that same conversation that we had.

But when my other friend said that she just felt kind of like jaded and numb about traveling to other places, my other friend asked her, "Well, do you try to stop and really reflect and soak in things as you go, or do you just kind of like see the things and, and truck along?" And those weren't like her exact words.

I can't remember exactly how she put it, but that was the gist.

And that right there is the answer.

At the core of what she was asking is, do you proactively participate in your experience by being present in the moment, by thinking about what you're seeing or learning and then asking questions, and then actively look for the wonder in this piece of the world that you're visiting? For someone who hasn't traveled a ton or maybe not in a long time, you don't really have to proactively do that as much because everything is so new, so you're like, "Oh my gosh, look at that," over the most mundane thing, just like a child would.

But if you've traveled a bunch and you feel like you've crossed over in your sense of travel wonder...

Side note, like this is making me think of like, do you remember that movie, I think it was called Baby Geniuses, where the toddlers start to turn into bigger kids, and then they, they cross over, and once they cross over, they forget about their experiences as a baby and as like a small toddler? I distinctly remember the scenery where the toddler was like, "He's crossing over." [laughs] But it's exactly that.

Like the more experience we have with travel, the more we start to lose touch with our childlike eagerness, who views every experience through those rose-colored glasses.

And that's unavoidable, right? The more we travel, the more that's just naturally gonna happen.

Just like as children, the more experiences they get, they're just naturally gonna lose that childlike sense of wonder.

And so when that happens, you either have to proactively participate in your experience by being more intentional in looking for the wonder and asking questions and diving deeper, or you're just gonna be kinda blah and kinda numb and kinda jaded.