Find Yourself

We’ve all made a journey once in our lives. It could be from the house to the grocery store, it could be from one town to the next, or these days, one country to the other. Either way, we’ve all made a trip that changed our lives or just added petrol costs to our monthly bill.

There could be an infinite number of reasons to why one wants to travel. If I go on listing them, a hundred magazines wouldn’t be enough, let alone one. So, for this one magazine, I will tell you one reason; a fresh start. Since the time I was 8 months old, my life has been one made of travel. A constant 15 years of visiting all the airports I could connecting India and the UK. London, Stanway, Heathrow, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore – the list would stretch as long as the miles I journeyed. And every place that I visited and stayed was another memory I absorbed. “A good life is a collection of happy memories” Denis Waitley had said. I personally think a good life is a collection of all memories. And where better to develop this life than in the constant change and excitement of voyaging through wonders before us?

But it’s all those melodramatic movies about travelling that always end with that saying, “find yourself”. I for one, think that is a stretch. Expecting a city bustler to succumb to nature’s quiet in the mountains before they succumb to the lack of oxygen is pretentious. Hoping that a small-town civilian would blend in with the city folks amongst their glass window giants is probably foolhardy. It was definitely a fool’s errand anyway, in 1996, when my mother moved to Mumbai from their town in South India. She had stayed there with her family for a grand total of 3 months when they had decided that in the city, people were always on the run; and they simply preferred to walk. So back they went to their town.

And yet here she is. Here my father is; from a similarly small town. Both 8000 kilometers away from home, and yet, in a home of their own here in Colchester. And here I am, as a tag along on the ride, before I drive my own car too. You must be getting tired by now of all the quests I’ve been adding on to this rant of mine. But in truth what I do want to say - something all those movie endings seem to forget - is that while travel is the harbor for those discoveries of our personalities and what not, isn’t it simply the vessel, or a magnifying glass of all things, to see what we already have? What better woods can those trees grow than the problems we’ve navigated before? What better mountains could those rocks build than the hurdles we all have trekked? What better seas could those waves paint than the unsure waters we’ve still sailed in? Which country, state, city or village could really give us a home until we deem it ours? None. Not in a single place you travel would you find yourself other than in your very own mind.

So, for the sake of not ending this on a cheesy line like “find yourself in yourself” or whatever nonsense you can come up with, I will say that travel provides the scope for developing and changing one’s personality, but it’s that little person from that little town who does all the changing; to meet all those vast, endless cities.