Sitting in your office, you look up at the clock that looms on the wall above your head. It’s 2:28 p.m.; exactly two hours and 32 minutes until 5 p.m. You peel your eyes from the clock and focus in on your computer and the almost innumerable tabs open in your browser as you try against all odds to complete the last of the tasks on your day’s agenda.
Your chair is beginning to grow more and more uncomfortable by the minute–has it always been this lumpy? You stare at your screen for about two hours, slowing chipping away at the final pieces of the work week puzzle–only 30 minutes left until the week is over. You look back up at the clock just in time to see it tick from 2:48 to 2:49.
What you need right now–maybe more than ever before–is an escape.
The best escape isn’t necessarily the one you get walking out of the office on Friday at 5 (if it ever comes), or from sitting on your couch with Netflix and a beer. The best escape is exploration.
Travel is an escape. Travel is a way to both discover new cultures and explore the previously unknown and take a quick break from the humdrum in and out, day in and day out of everyday life.
Some claim that seeing travel as a means of escape is just disillusion–it’s a separation of reality that isn’t backed in anything but pure fantasy. The word escape doesn’t necessarily indicate a desire to escape from reality, it’s an escape from normality, from repetition and from boredom.
Traveling to escape isn’t a separation from reality–quite the opposite in fact–it’s a connection to reality. It’s a connection to realms of the world with which you’ve never seen. It’s a connection between you and the Earth–between you and the visceral enjoyment that you can, and should derive from living.
There is much more than just the reality of your day job or the reality of your evenings spent at home. There is an enormous reality out there waiting to be explored. The realities experienced by others–whether it’s people in Spain, Germany, Argentina or just Boston–might not be the same realities that you experience every day but these are the realities that we as human beings should seek.
Every time we escape our everyday lives to experience the realities of others we’re opening our eyes, expanding our horizons and broadening our scope. Traveling to escape is one of life’s purest pleasures and should be embraced, not scorned.