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From Ryan Holiday, "This is Always Worth All The Trouble (Or so I tell myself)

 

​This Is Always Worth All The Trouble (Or So I Tell Myself)​ There are a million good reasons not to travel. I woke up with a bunch of them this morning. I was exhausted. My kids were fighting. My wife has been sick. It was ungodly hot—literally the hottest Europe has ever been. My routine is out the window. So is any sense of a budget. Our suitcases are already full of knick-nacks and crap we don’t need and there’s quite a bit of trip left. The car that was supposed to pick us up for our tour is late. But we’re in Rome. It’s all worth it…or so I tell myself. Even though travel can be expensive, stressful, and frustrating. Even though it tests your patience. Even though things go wrong. Even though you know that when you get home, you’ll be behind on everything. Still, it’s worth it. It has always been worth it. For all their warnings against escapism, the Stoics traveled widely—in an age when travel was far slower, harder, and more dangerous. Unlike his stepfather Antoninus, who never left Italy, Marcus Aurelius was on the road a lot as emperor. It wasn’t always pleasant. But it undoubtedly influenced his philosophy and his view of the world. He could have sent someone else to inspect the troops on his behalf, but he chose to go. When the calls of duty and the road converged, he went. Seneca was born in Corduba, Spain (modern Córdoba), moved to Rome, and in addition to his exile in Corsica, lived for nearly a decade in Egypt. Posidonius (a key figure in Middle Stoicism) worked and lived in many places throughout his long life—Syria, Athens, Rome, and Rhodes—and traveled almost the entirety of the known world. After completing his studies under Posidonius, Athenodorus traveled widely as a lecturer, reaching Petra, Egypt, and other major Mediterranean cities before becoming young Octavian’s teacher in Apollonia, on the coast of modern Albania. These were critical experiences for them. Then, and now, hitting the road was a source of wisdom. It shaped their philosophy. It enlarged their view of the world. It opened their eyes to new lands, new customs, new perspectives. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” Mark Twain famously wrote, “and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” This was true of America in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it was true in Rome in the first century. Marcus Aurelius’ passages in Meditations which reference being a citizen of the world were almost certainly shaped by the people he met in Athens and Tarsus and Alexandria (and of course the people he met in Rome who had traveled there from far away). Every culture thinks its norms are, well, normal. One of my favorite examples of this is the criticism I get that by talking about politics I am “upsetting half my audience.” It’s the most American thing in the world to assume that the world is as evenly divided as America is. (Shocker, it’s not!) Only travel can shake us from this ethnocentrism, awakening us to the plain fact that our way of life is but one of many. In our travels, we meet people who care about different things, wear different clothes, tell different stories, eat different foods, speak different languages. When he traveled, Montaigne sucked up everything he saw like a vacuum, avoiding much in the way of plans, leaving himself open to chance encounters and experiences. Like the time he came across men leading two ostriches on leashes as a present for a duke. He stopped in at every church he could find, taking in their various practices like an anthropologist. When the New World was discovered—basically in his lifetime—Montaigne did not think the people who lived there were savages. From his travels, he understood that every distant land has its own culture and beliefs—and that our customs would seem just as barbaric to them. Not that he defended the “horrible barbarity” of cannibalism. What struck him was that “while judging correctly of their wrong-doings we should be so blind to our own.” Did the cannibals draw and quarter each other? Commit atrocities? Accuse each other of black magic? Who was actually the barbarian? Perhaps it was a lesson he first absorbed from his extensive reading of Herodotus, our first great historian and travel writer, who traveled thousands over the course of his life—from Persia to Athens to Italy, Libya, Babylonia, Byzantium, and the Black Sea. Above all, he delighted in getting inside the nomos of each place—the people’s customs, and the ways they differed from his own. He loved to tell the story about a small sect in India that ate a small piece of their dead as part of a religious ritual. Obscene! Disgusting! But how did these people react when told that Greeks burned their dead at the funeral pyre? An outrage! A sacrilege! Me and Herodotus in the Palazzo Massimo The world is very big. The place you call home is only one small corner of it. There is wisdom on the other side of the hill, wisdom in the experiences that only the road can give you, wisdom in learning how other people live and why they live that way. It’s easy to be comfortable where you are. To tell yourself that travel isn’t worth all the hassle. To think of it as a luxury, an indulgence, a needless extravagance. But it isn’t. It’s essential. “I was never a fan of people who don’t leave home,” the well-traveled Joan Didion once wrote. “It just seems like part of your duty in life.” But leaving home doesn’t have to mean going far. It doesn’t have to mean spending lots of money on some exotic trip to the other side of the world. I remember talking to a waitress in Natchez, Mississippi once who told me she had never been to Vicksburg (a little over an hour away!). Growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, I was lucky my parents took us on trips to Europe and China and Canada and Mexico, but I BARELY ever went to downtown Sacramento. Or even San Francisco. I only discovered the fullness of those cities as an adult. Don’t tell yourself you’ll do it later. When you’re older. When the kids are older. When things settle down. When you have more money. When it’s more convenient. That misses the point. You don’t need the benefits of travel someday, when your life is perfectly arranged for it. You need them now. So hit the road! Travel to the well-known places and the little seen. Travel by boat and by car and by train and by plane and by foot. Read the signs. Struggle with the language barrier. See things from the other side of the road. Eat the food. Go to the museums. Sit at sidewalk cafes. See the ancient hieroglyphs and notice graffiti on city streets. See the cemeteries. Visit the battlefields. Listen to people chatter. Learn. Explore. Be curious. Ask questions. Carry a notebook. Write down everything you see and feel and think. See your own country as a tourist. Live abroad like a local. Every building, every person has a story. Think of what they witnessed. Think of who stood where you are standing. Think of what was here before any of this was here. Think of what people used to think here, what they were afraid of, what they hoped for, what they believed. Let things go wrong (and they will!). These experiences teach as much as anything else. Last summer, I spent 27 days in Greece with my family, covering some 3,000 kilometers between Athens, Olympia, Ithaca, Delphi, Thermopylae, Mount Olympus, Marathon, and Cape Sounio. We were in a Chinese rental car that was far too big for tiny ancient streets. We got a flat tire at the top of Mount Olympus. I was stung by a jellyfish near Thermopylae. We bumped into friends I hadn’t seen since high school. We got ripped off. On the last day, a bee stung me in the back of the throat and I almost died. Oh, and somewhere in between there, I got myself a bad case of sunstroke. But that’s what travel is supposed to be. Travel is an adventure. Travel is pushing your limits. Travel is trying new things. Travel is learning that most problems can be solved, most setbacks can be survived, and most of what goes wrong can be figured out. You don’t have to be gone for long. You don’t have to spend a fortune. You don’t have to see the whole world to become a worldly person. But you have to check out what’s on the other side of the hill a couple times. You have to expose yourself to different places, different people, different perspectives. You have to hit the road. It will be disruptive. Your patience will be tested. Things will go wrong. And it will all be worth it.

 

Before You Buy, Ask: What Is This Inviting Into My Life? Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Jyoti Yadav of Jyoti Simple Life. When we go shopping, we carry a list in our mind or on paper of what we need to buy. But it rarely happens that we bring home exactly what we planned. If something attractive catches our eye, something we feel we simply cannot resist, we often can’t stop ourselves. Something similar happened to me. I had gone to the market for grocery shopping, but my eyes fell on a very beautiful and captivating bouquet of flowers. No matter how many times I tried to look away, I couldn’t. It was drawing me in so strongly that I felt compelled to buy it. Without thinking, swept away by emotion, I bought that bouquet in addition to my groceries. I sat in the car with great excitement, bouquet in hand. While I was sitting there, a reel from Joshua Becker appeared on my screen. In the video he asked, “Have you ever thought about what else you invite into your life when you buy something?” When I truly understood what he was saying, I realized there is a very important point we overlook. While buying something, we usually only focus on its price. Or maybe we read reviews, check quality, or compare prices across websites so we feel clever for having done such thorough research. Mostly, we have been trained to focus on price and quality when shopping. But that video raised a crucial point we often miss: We are not just bringing an item into our home. We are bringing in much more along with it. We would be wise to ask: What else is this item bringing home with it? When I got home with the bouquet, I looked around and the first problem was that I had no vase to put it in. So that was an added expense. Then came the next problem: finding a spot for the vase in my living room. The only corner I could find was next to the sofa, occupied by a small side table we used for phones, cups, and such things. I realized that to make space for one item, I would have to adjust another. And to adjust that, perhaps a third. And maybe even remove something from the house entirely. One purchase. One unasked question. And the ripples had already spread through my entire home. And perhaps that’s when I began to understand the question for the first time: What else are you bringing into your home with that one purchase? Every item has two price tags. The first is the one we see in the store. The second is the one we pay later: the space it takes, the time it asks for, the maintenance it requires, and the attention it keeps demanding from us. That evening, while preparing to end the day, I opened my wardrobe and immediately the clothes sparked the same thoughts inside me. I began looking closer. I found so many clothes I had bought on sale to save money. Clothes I have never worn to this day. Their price tags are still attached. I didn’t need them, but the temptation of a sale was such that, trying to save a little money, I had given space in my home to unnecessary things. I also understood that big companies know exactly how to tempt people. In the hope of saving a few dollars, we buy off-season clothes. But by the time that season arrives, new designs are already in the market, and what we bought six months ago may already feel boring or out of trend. I’ve adopted a new habit now. Before any purchase, I try to ask the question: What are you inviting in along with this one item? And not just while shopping. In any decision in life, we need to stop and ask ourselves: Do I really need this right now? If I buy it, where will it go? Will it be easy to maintain? Will it increase my expenses? Will it bring peace into my life, or only more to manage? When you develop this awareness within yourself, you begin to shop differently. You begin to see that not every beautiful thing needs to come home with you. Not every sale saves you money. Not every desire needs to be followed. Sometimes the wiser choice is simply to leave the item where it is. No matter how pretty the flowers might be. *** Jyoti Yadav is the founder of Jyoti Simple Life where she writes about simple living, mindful habits, and finding peace in everyday life. After a financial crisis turned her world upside down, she chose simplicity—and never looked back.

Early Spring

 

Today, by Mary Oliver