{wanderlust: a strong innate desire to rove or travel about}
Don’t travel. Don’t explore. Don’t yearn to be somewhere you’re not. Because the moment you do, the moment you make the world your stomping grounds, you will never be able to settle again. Your heart will long for foreign lands and your browser history with overflow with travel sites and destination searches. You will start speaking in cliched travel quotes and compulsively checking to make sure your passport is on you at all times. And you will love every minute of it.
{the aesthetic of lostness}
This past semester in the Czech Republic is inexpressable in material terms: the people I met, the cuisine I overindulged in, the places I got lost and the memories that will never fade came together in a glorious hectic amalgamation to create one of the very best experiences of my life. Looking back, there is no shortage of lows throughout the course of my adventures: illness, exhaustion, frustration, miscommunication. However, though these lows were often even lower than back home, the highs were so incomparably higher that they veritably ruled out the perpetual setbacks that accompany any adventurer. This is, of course, the ballad of anyone who has travelled before.
{don’t forsake this life of yours}
To look at my bucket list as a 21 year old student and realize that I’ve crossed off more than many people twice my age is an emotion more uplifting than words can capture or money can afford. Travelling is a dangerous cycle because each new place your spirit captures fosters the impetus to continue meandering forever.
{where I’d rather be}
Since I returned to the states, most of my free time is spent planning my next adventure. Granted, as a student of International Studies, my life focus is more travel-centric than most, so there is a high likelihood that I’m biased in this matter. Nonetheless, I can’t help but encourage everyone I meet to abandon their comfort zone and let me drag them headfirst into a world of cultures and possibilities. That, I think, is what I will retain the most from my semester abroad: the urge to introduce others to the majesty of living as a citizen of the world.
{the adventure of a lifetime}
This I’ve learned: don’t let one experience be the adventure of a lifetime; let your lifetime itself be the ultimate adventure. I feel as though often travel gets misinterpreted as a luxury of the wealthy, a posh pastime of those with too much time on their hands, and is overlooked as the life-altering experience it is. When people ask me what I want to be doing in 10 years, I tell them I want to be a professor abroad or an international aid worker helping resettle refugees or something along those lines. And while that is all quite true, who I want to be, how I want to be known, is as a traveller, and I have the Czech Republic to thank for getting me set on that path.
{flirting with the world}
I’ve never been a domestic soul; I’ve never been comfortable settling or accepting the status quo. It worries my family that I’m going to disappear overseas and excites my friends that they can live vicariously through me. I can’t honestly say which of those reactions is more warranted, and as this post comes to an end, I acknowledge that it has been more about myself than about my semester in Olomouc, but isn’t that ultimately the point? To find in life that passion which commits you to waking up each morning with the drive to set the world on fire?
Life is fleeting. Make it spectacular.
