What’s traveling to you?
Traveling means you’re going from one place to another, especially over a long distance. You therefore, will need to have the patience to get there. Be ready for new knowledge that journey will bring you, accept that which is different from your own, behave or adapt to ways that are unlike what you are, what you know, or are used to.
This is a journey. You cannot know at hand what to expect.
How challenging is it going to be for you?
Do you have the patience and what it takes to see yourself through?
Will it be friendly and easy?
And yet, before you embark on your journey, there must be a reason, a purpose. You know the basics and the benefits.
Are you ready for the unknown?
The hardship?
The new experience?
Traveling improves your communication skills. It broadens your horizons. It helps you connect, understand and learn new and different things; cultures, customs, languages, and ways of living that exist elsewhere in a world beyond your own.
You get to know, understand, explore, and mitigate criticism of yourself and your surroundings with a different view. There is an awareness that will be generated into you.
Plus, it gives you something to compare your whole self to.
To travel means arousing a sense of curiosity; you want to know more, you want to learn further.
There is an urgent need to understand why something is done in a certain way.
Why groups of people or societies are different from yourself or the world you have known all your life?
Why do they behave, dress, eat, walk, and talk the way they do?
Who are these people that I have met during my travel?
What do we have in common?
What relationship, if any, can I have with them?
I love traveling, and luckily, from when my mother was a diplomat, to the kind of job my husband does – civil engineering, I have had opportunities to live and visit several countries worldwide;
From Pakistan and its Muree hills, old cities like Peshawar and its colourful bazars, to Iceland, the land of fire and ice, amazing waterfalls, the northern lights, snake roads and reindeer sightings, to Peru and its Machu Pichu, Inca snake trains from aquas calientes, tasty food, beautiful people, you name it
For me, as a black woman, an African with dark skin, a foreigner, traveling has been about discovering who I am out there in the world.
Beyond My Threshold.
Beyond the Threshold…into Self-Discovery
is my story, my journey, my experience, my opinion, my understanding.
From the places I have been to, the people I have met along the way, cultural differences I have come across, language barriers I have encountered, beliefs I have learned about, and lots of similarities that exist around the world.
Conspicuousness Generates a lot of Curiosity
Because out there, you are unique. There is a noticeable habit, oddness or weakness that the world sees.
It’s about how you get watched, observed, scrutinised, analysed, and critised.
What element of you is conspicuous to the world out there?
Is it the colour of your skin or your beliefs?
Is it about the way you dress up, or the way you eat, walk and talk?
The world is uninformed of who you are, unsure of where you came from and why, and yet uses that ignorance to misjudge and make concrete misconceptions about you.
The world you think knows you so much does not know you at all.
Question: How much, do you yourself, know the world?
Because out there, you are an invader, a threat, you are unknown, you’re scared, exposed and vulnerable. You are feared.
You are there to occupy space that’s not yours.
Beyond your threshold.
But remember, it’s not always about you. You must consider the other person or people. Where do they come from? How much exposure have they had about you as a person, or where you come from?
Because, difference provokes disorientation and resistance. The fear of the unknown, fear of what is different.
And this fear, might dictate our attitude towards anyone we deem not similar to us, creating racism or profiling.
Stereotyping a group of people, judging without understanding, hating without reason, pushing away without analysing, and despising without knowing.
These are all common practices in many parts of and around the world.
Simply because people are different from us.
Misconceptions mostly caused by our ignorance and failure to acknowledge each other.
Because we have an instilled idea or concept about a particular people or groups of people, mostly based on entirely false information or based on a kind of psychological upbringing.
A chain no one wants to break by having some level of exposure, learning and understanding more about whoever is conceived as different from us.
Because, we grow up learning, seeing, observing, experiencing, and understanding the views of our parents, families, or societies.
We rub shoulders with those same groups of people on a daily basis.
Their ideologies get instilled in our mentality. We master their
ways and believe they are what is right, positive, negative, or
otherwise.
Most of the time, we may not get exposed elsewhere to learn
and understand that, however different anybody might be from us, at the end of the day, we do actually have something in common. We share lots of similarities and identify in one way or another.
Beyond the Threshold…into Self-Discovery
This is My Story. What’s Yours?
