On Travel

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. - Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. - St. Augustine

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Cath the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain

This sensual yearning for knowledge, this insatiable wanderlust, this long desire. - Antaole France

Aventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of mankind - and perhaps relaize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white. - Mark Jenkins

Travel does what good novelists do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art. - Freya Stark

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

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. - Mark Twain

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. - Cesare Pavese

Travel is the great true love of my life. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby - I just don't CARE what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to - I just don't care. - Elizabeth Gilbert

Not all those who wander are lost. - J.R.R. Tolkien

***

What I know is this: I don't have the answers. In my life, I have searched sincerely and diligently for the meaning of life. Not always and not consistently, but often and in earnest. And this is my ever-evolving conclusion: the meaning of life is not a singular answer, but a journey in and of itself. I don't think there is one universal meaning to life - what your life means to you is what you decide it will mean. In Japan alone, I've witnessed people whose apparent goal in life is to make as much money as humanly possible, people whose goal is to get drunk and get laid every night, people whose goal is to find a rich husband and get married, people whose goal is to become a parent...you maximize in your life those things that either mean something to you, make you happy, or otherwise provide some type of gratification. I don't think there is a right or wrong answer, as long as you do not hurt others in seeking out your goal and generally keep in line with the Golden Rule.

For me, I've concluded that there may or may not be heaven and hell. There may or may not be afterlife. So - this life here on earth, it may be all we have. And if it is all we have, then I want to be happy. And if it's not all we have, and there is an afterlife, well...I still want my life on earth to be happy. Maybe it sounds simple, maybe it sounds shallow, but my goal in life is simply: to be happy.

Happiness itself is subjective of course, and after 30 years of trial and error, I've figured out the things that make me happy: a good novel, a full night's sleep, laughter, friends, family, good food, exercise, writing, snowboarding, good conversation, connecting with people, love, falling in love, being in love, snow, sun, beautiful nature, good weather and travel.