Personal Legend

“To realize one’s personal legend is a person’s only real obligation.  All things are one.  And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

Traveling around the world to other countries can offer you many opportunities for personal growth.  It can help you discover character traits that you didn’t know existed, give you great practice in staying calm in chaotic situations, improve your interpersonal skills, and become more culturally sensitive.  All of this can help you realize who you are and what your interests and motivations are.  With this in mind many people who find themselves in a transitional time of their lives look to traveling to help them find answers.

Most (not all) of the people that I have met in traveling in Spain, Germany and China were in some sort of transitional situation that they were dealing with back in their home country.  Some examples; being in between jobs or seeking to change careers, and being in between schooling.  Leaving your country and your situation and going to a “neutral zone” allows you to focus on yourself.   Most of these travelers are young (20s and 30s) and have not settled down yet because they are still struggling with who they are or what they are going to do with their life.  Traveling is in a sense like meditation, it forces you to look within for the answers that you seek.     

I am a pretty strong advocate for staying in hostels when traveling around the world, especially if you are traveling alone.  Hostels are excellent hubs for travelers to have a place to sleep, eat, drink, participate in tours together, and make new friends.  Traveling alone forces you into situations that are outside of your comfort zone and forces you to become more self reliant.  As a consequence you can learn a lot about yourself and may even become more self confident.  For example, when staying at a hostel, making friends to accompany you with on your excursions and party with will make your experience magnitudes better than if you spend your stay alone.  But making friends is completely up to you, this forces you to step out of your comfort zone (if you are shy or are inexperienced) and go up to strangers and strike up a conversation.  If you don’t make a move, then there is no possibility of you making those friends.  

Now I hope I have set the scene a little bit about why people travel and what its benefits can be for an individual.  Now try to imagine what happens when you put a bunch of these individuals together in a group.  You have a group of people who are individually on their own journeys and are actively pushing themselves out of their comfort zones and into new situations.  But really we are all on the same journey to find our own “personal legend” and because we recognize this and are attracted to this similarity, as travelers we tend conspire to help out in each others journeys.  We encourage and support each other in the trying new things and then we celebrate the occasions together.  It is wonderful to learn from the experiences and lessons shared by other travelers. And hopefully my own lessons and experiences have made a positive influence on them as well.

My Fellow Travelers I Made Friend with in Berlin (Me in the Middle back)