The Real Journey Begins Before We Go
How the space before every trip becomes a mirror for meaning, alignment and intent
Somewhere over Eastern Europe…
Before I accept a call to a destination, I have come to respect and revel in the invitation, the phase of intentional travel before the movement where creative calculations marry expectation to execution. And so then as I prepare for three very different trips to Seoul & Kyoto, Malta and New Zealand, I keep coming back to the critical but often overlooked role this “runway” before the journey plays. Just as post-travel can affect and influence us long after we return home, this underutilized stretch of time can inspire us long before we ever pack a suitcase. If only, we were more willing to let go. And actually let it.
If travel is among other things a series of connected micro-movements of joy, discovery and gratitude then the space we prime and open up for it is invaluable, fertile real estate. The more I travel with intent, the more I realize how I approach each trip determines how in rhythm and in sync I will arrive across my mind, body, gut and soul. Our pre-travel rituals can become the difference between harmoniously absorbing alignment and meaning or accidentally resisting and rejecting it.
Before every takeoff, it is likely we will taxi through minefields of anticipation, possibility and even dread or disappointment. There’s the palpable excitement we feel wash over us when we finally book and socialize our plans with co-workers, friends and family. There’s the brightening sense of curiosity and wonder we awaken when we research and shape out ambitious itineraries and must-see lists. But there’s also the undercurrent of pressure and overwhelm we inevitably invite in by wanting to see everything just right, pack it all in just so and make every moment count.
Floating indiscriminately about all this expectation is a tiny, but mighty voice vying for our attention. It pleads from deep inside with an unshakeable, knowing clarity and conviction. Its chief mission addresses a single-minded, self-serving concern that peer pressure, societal demands and outside influences usually dismiss and drown out – our why.
As an ardent believer in the transformative power of travel, I routinely obsess over the tension that lives between our travel whys and hows. After careful dissection including a long hard look at my own dissonance, I am convinced this tension emerges from a growing collective passivity. Somewhere along the way, social media and the performative culture that feeds it seduced us into abandoning altogether or compromising just enough the trust we held in our own inner compasses. It was then consciously or not, we permitted culprits like convenience, politeness, burnout, groupthink and even a desperate sense for belonging to cloud and suffocate our most important signal for movement - our why.
Behind this shift it is too easy to skip over self-awareness and reflection and jump straight into the arms of immediacy, algorithms and instant gratification. As we do, the muscles that lift and brighten our spirits and souls, carve out meaning and self-discovery everywhere we turn and stretch our creativity and open up our hearts and minds, atrophy. The aperture on the lens we view the world through narrows and suddenly when the first pang of disenchantment hits, all that awe, color and depth around us feels alarmingly subdued, distant or worse yet, slick and generated. It is at this moment of truth, for some a rock-bottom, for others an inflection point and others still a speed bump of denial - we finally sense what is missing. We have been traveling without our why.
When we move without a why, we don’t have an anchor, a set point or a sense of self to come back to. We then metaphorically and understandably grasp and claw at whatever gets thrown at our feet. We spend more, travel farther, shock harder until the peace and meaning we had been seeking all along unravels. From there, one of two things can happen. We either quietly question why but run the hamster wheel faster and faster to outpace what we do not want to confront. Or we really ask why and muster up the courage and curiosity to slam this runaway treadmill’s big red stop button.
There’s also a third likely scenario. Someone or some force stuns us and knocks us off the hamster wheel altogether. It's been almost a year since a layoff forced me to see how my own values, creative energy and potential had drifted devastatingly out of alignment with one another. While by all accounts, I had been playing my hand successfully, living well and tasting the best the world had to offer, I can now see I was alive but not living. I was robotically preoccupied with so much doing, reaching, consuming, posturing and accumulating…
I was a body with a soul instead of a soul with a body.
An instinct to travel home to myself paid off and as I drifted back to my center, I finally came to see how I had spent a lifetime misusing and ignoring the transformative power of travel. I have now come to recognize and savor the distinction between being in motion and moving with intent and meaning. This past year, days and months of inspiring collisions with people, pages and places have reignited my creativity, restored my sense of belonging and redirected my energy to the heart of my purpose.
In a world longing for authenticity and meaning, belonging and connectivity and alignment and peace, intentional travel doesn’t just present a solve, it presents a salve. In practice, traveling with why as our true north looks like saying “no thank you” to trips that don’t feel like they align with our curiosity and cravings. It means getting selfish with our time and energy and dedicating it unapologetically to refilling our creative cups, soothing our misaligned souls and recharging our depleted power sources. It means boldly saying yes to our inner child, to the solo trip we’ve always wanted to take and to answering the call to return when there are so many other places yet to see. It is trusting our gut, our inclinations and ourselves.
Intentional travel when it is why-led sets us up to come back home without a certain brand of regret, longing or resentment. In exchange for that outcome and peace of mind, we must be willing to tune in to what we actually need as we sit on that proverbial runway. It goes without saying our time away is limited. The same can be said of our resources. Why wouldn’t we then, invest just a little more time to listen, reflect and absorb on how we can most effectively put this precious time to work or even play for us?
Before we ever pick a destination and set the itinerary, we must journey through stillness. We must be willing to listen for and accept the signal being dispatched from within. Complicated as our lives can be, I believe these signals or patterns in our pre-travel instincts cluster naturally and simply around three distinct phases of motion. My philosophy, the Untethered travel philosophy considers how each one calls us toward a different kind of movement. We can be called to travel for Release to restore, let go or clear inertia. We can turn to travel for Alignment to recenter or reestablish harmony between our values and our cravings. And there may be some seasons of life, where we crave Ignition, traveling for that spark of growth, creativity or transformation.
When we action a journey against our signals, we adopt a more expansive travel mindset where we can more readily surrender and succumb to our why. Intentional travel inexplicably moves us where we need to go. Not through sorcery, subscriptions or listicles but on the backs of our own agency and gumption. For the only compass that knows both our way and our why is our own. Why not follow it?
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