Ever felt consumed with all the "dos" and the "donts", the "musts" and "musts not"? Do you want to escape from the confines of your everyday life? Would you want to test your own soul and experience something different, something unfamiliar? You maybe are longing to travel. Why don't you try traveling on your own - alone?
Oxford Dictionary defines traveling as the act of “making journeys or going from place to place”. Travel entails a change in location, a change in the environment. Traveling alone therefore means being in a journey on your own, without anybody to care for you. Completely independent!
Travel has been one of the most popular leisure activities known to man. It never fails to excite people of all ages, from young to senior citizen. It provides temporary refuge from the reality of everyday life and brings you into an imaginary world of freedom.
Imagine yourself boarding a bus. Then, for the next 15 hours or so, you'll be traveling with only yourself, you luggage, your temporary shelter, and yes, the crews and other passengers on that bus. But who are they anyway? Technically, you are alone. Those people around you would not care whatever you'll do with yourself. They would not bother to ask whatever thoughts are running in your mind. Or at least, they don't seem to care. Yeah right, I missed that part of my college life, where I got to go home to the province at least twice a year. And I was always traveling alone. It's been a year now since I last travel back home.
Traveling alone offers a wider venue for self discovery. It allows you to try out new things at your own risk. Maybe because you just want to try something new, or maybe because nobody's going to do it for you so you have no choice but to do it. Whatever the reason will be, doing a thing for the first time is really fun, isn't it? Especially when you are in an unfamiliar place, with the unfamiliar environment, and all those unfamiliar faces around you. Unfamiliar at least because you don't get to be in that place and be with those people everyday.
Traveling alone offers more freedom. It allows you to do your own thing and take your own time, at your own expense. It makes you responsible for your own journey and accountable to yourself. Figuratively, when you travel alone, you're holding your life in your hands.
Life is a journey worth taking, they say. As Father Liber Ortega said, “In order to grow, there is one movement we need to go through. It is the movement tat leads us deeper into ourselves”. So, why not make your own journey, and initiate a movement that will allow you to discover the hidden part of you? It's fun to travel with family and friends, but it's exciting to travel alone. Quoting Ursula Leguin, “it is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end”.
