Since I am posting this while I’m on an eleven-day tour of Ireland, October 19 seemed an appropriate day to talk about travel. I love to travel and see new places. But it turns out that travel is also good for you. Though I am not a huge Deepak Chopra fan, I do like what his website has to say about the benefits of travel.
- Travel promotes heart health. When you travel, you are likely to move more than you do at home, especially if you are retired, or have a desk job. People who travel regularly tend to be healthier.
- Travel keeps the mind sharp. When you travel, you meet new situations, new cultures, and new people. It is good for your brain to have to engage with different experiences.
- Travel enhances creativity. Engaging with a new culture opens different pathways in the brain, especially if you are immersed in the culture and the new experiences. For a writer like myself, this is especially helpful.
- Travel relieves stress and boosts mental health. Getting away from everyday stresses can be very healthy. In addition, just the pleasure you get from planning the trip can improve your outlook on life, because you have something to look forward to.
- Travel shifts perspective. Getting outside your comfort zone is ultimately a positive experience. It is also educational to see how other people view life, and perhaps even how they view your country.
- Travel increases connection to others and self. Travel gives you a chance to meet new people, particularly if you are on a tour of any length. It can also give you a chance to better get to know the person you are traveling with.
So there you go – if you need an excuse to travel, you now have it! (I highly recommend Ireland.)
Quotes about travel
Any successful journey begins by packing your luggage full of imagination.–Kathrine Palmer Peterson
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate lovingly, our own.–Margaret Mead
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.–Miriam Beard
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.–Robert Louis Stevenson
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.–Lao Tzu
I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.–Jack Kerouac
The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.–Agnes Repplier
The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.–Shirley MacLaine
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends.–Maya Angelou
To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.–Charles Horton Cooley
To travel is to take a journey into yourself.–Danny Kaye
Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like to much wrapping paper, the traveler finds himself reduced to more modest proportion – but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.–Nicolas Bouvier
The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only one page.–Saint Augustine
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