Our Top 14 Reasons To Travel The World

Why would anyone choose to sell everything they own and leave their home, family and friends to travel the world? Is it just a crazy whim? Are they just impulsive? Have they thought it through? Seriously, who *does* that?

Well, Wayne and I plan to! This Fall (2021), in fact.

Ask us why we want to travel, and the first thing that often pops out of our mouths is “We hate winter!” But that’s just a shallow, easy answer. Of course we prefer warm weather, but there are so many more important reasons we have chosen slow travel as our new lifestyle. We have spent a lot of time thinking of why we truly want this, and all our reasons to travel can basically be summed up in one sentence:

We wholeheartedly believe that travel, if done with the right attitude and purpose, will help us become the best people we can be by helping us improve in all of the important categories of our lives!

But how can travel do that? 

And why, exactly, do we want to travel?

Here are our top 14 reasons to travel!

Table of Contents

• 1. To learn – All we can! 
• 2. To improve our health – Both physical and mental. 
• 3. To meet people
• 4. To improve our quality of life
• 5. To improve our love relationship 
• 6. To broaden our view and open our minds
• 7. To increase our gratitude
• 8. To challenge ourselves
• 9. For less responsibility
• 10. To leave our beliefs behind
• 11. To make room for what is important
• 12. For personal growth
• 13. For the warm weather
• 14. Because we can!
• Conclusion

1. To learn – All we can!

Travelling with an open heart and mind offers so many opportunities for learning about, well, everything really! Different cultures and traditions, languages and religions, history, the day-to-day details of how people from another place live their lives; this list can go on and on. And then there’s the physical environment, the flora and fauna of different countries. There is just so much we haven’t experienced about the world!

Apart from this “whole new world” point of view (learning about places and people that we aren’t familiar with), there is also learning about the actual processes of travelling as a lifestyle. The systems and processes of “us” travelling the world, dealing with all of the unfamiliar details daily. We love learning, and this will be the biggest learning experience we’ve ever had.

2. To improve our health – Both physical and mental.

Yes, we can exercise and move wherever we are, but at this point in our lives we have dreams of a life wandering the streets and paths of unfamiliar countries, climbing hillsides to explore ancient temples, wandering day and night markets … we want a lifestyle where movement as exploration is an integral part of our daily life. Right now in our normal, routine daily life, we make time for working out and try to walk daily, but it’s certainly not an *integral part* of our life.

As for our mental health: while we’re sure there will be many stresses during our travels, we hope to use them as opportunities for personal growth as we deal with the challenges that occur. There’s also the “get away from it all” vacation-type mode we’ll likely experience at the beginning of our travels. Lastly, I’m pretty sure I have mild Seasonal Affective Disorder which will hopefully be resolved by leaving the long, cold and grey winters I’ve experienced for the first 47 years of my life!

3. To meet people

This is sort of an odd reason for us because both Wayne and I tend to be more introverted, although we do enjoy meeting people. We don’t tend to like hanging out with people just for the sake of hanging out; we’re more than happy with each other’s company. 

But in meeting new people we learn how to see things from a different perspective. We open ourselves up to different points of view and become more open to, or aware of, different beliefs and philosophies. Hopefully, we’ll become wiser.

4. To improve our quality of life

One of our top reasons to travel is to improve our quality of life. The areas we want to travel (hopefully starting with Southeast Asia) all generally have a lower cost of living – pretty much everything that we need to live costs less than we’d pay in Canada, including rent, food, local travel, etc. Of course, there are other expenses that we wouldn’t have at home such as insurance and flights, but overall we’ll be paying the same (or less) as we’d be paying here while improving the quality of our life experiences both physically and mentally.

5. To improve our love relationship

This is a constant goal of ours, to have an exceptional love affair! Our relationship is the basis of our life, and we are constantly trying to be the best that we can be as a couple, for each other. And as we all know, change is good! 

After a while (and remember, we’ve been together 20 years!) you get to know each other pretty well, so well that we *may* occasionally think there’s nothing left to learn. Not so! While we do know how the other is *likely to act in a certain situation,* a new situation is a different thing entirely.  Change can spice it up!

Travel will allow us to see each other in different environments, to meet each other again. There will be so many new opportunities for us to grow together, situations to improve our communication and teamwork, to help each other. Travel will give us so many opportunities to fall in love with each other, again and again! This is one of our favorite reasons to travel!

6. To broaden our view and open our minds

When we’re in one place for a while, we get caught up in seeing the world as it is presented to us by others (friends and family, community, social media, etc) rather than actually going out to see and experience the world as it is. All too often, that presentation is negative. Travel will remove those filters as we directly experience other points of view and other ways of living and thinking.

7. To increase our gratitude

Gratitude, to me, is both a practice and an emotion, and it is so very important to cultivate in our daily life! When you are feeling true gratitude, you can’t feel negative emotions. You just can’t, because your heart is too full of joy and appreciation for what you have; there’s just no room for negativity! 

Wayne and I know we are incredibly blessed to have what we have, to live how we live, to have the love that we share; but sometimes it’s easy to forget to be grateful for all that. We have so much abundance that we take it for granted. The disparities between rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, that we will experience (as a “have-er”) during our travels will make it incredibly easy to cultivate gratitude on a daily basis.

8. To challenge ourselves

We try to challenge ourselves now with learning, etc but our life as we are living it is still quite habitual. Daily routine, nightly routine. Scheduling and time blocking (which, by the way, is a very effective time management system). Life is known and ordinary, the same life within a 2-hour drive. 

We can change the routine somewhat with mini-vacations, days outings and the like, but it’s still all very familiar and comfortable. And complacency is automatically the default that creeps back in even after short periods of change in a stable system.

This is probably why we’ve moved so often during our life together – it’s not that we’re bored so much as we prefer to shake it up … we find change brings growth opportunities. And I think travelling to different countries on a different continent with different cultures and traditions and environments is a definite way to shake things up! While we’ll still need routine, scheduling and time blocking while we’re travelling, I know we’ll absolutely be challenged in so many new ways! Not to mention the challenge of new adventures we’ll be having.

9. For less responsibility

Seriously? Yes. Mature? Yep. Honestly, we’ve had so many responsibilities for all of our life together; caring for others, pets or family, has been a very large part of our life. While we wouldn’t change a thing, we realize that we’ve never had time just for each other.. We’ve actually only ever had 2 very short, local vacations together. It’s time for us, and we can’t wait!

10. To leave our beliefs behind

We want to use travel as a way to open our hearts and minds to new truths. Right now we’re surrounded by our “things” and “stuff”. Every possession holds a memory or pattern, a certainty of the way things have been and are; everything is familiar. Travel means that everything is unfamiliar, which creates space for new ways of thinking and being.

11. To make room for what is important

I want to be more minimalist. I know you can be minimalistic in a home, but I’ve never reached the level I wanted. If there’s space, I tend to fill it with stuff I “love”, but eventually regret doing that because all the things that I wanted seem to take up too much space and require too much care (dusting, watering, cleaning, etc); in other words, take up my time and energy.  Wayne would be totally happy with an empty house but doesn’t mind when I fill it, until I get to the whiny “too much stuff everywhere” phase. 

When you’re living from a backpack, it forces you to have only what you truly need or want and love. I want to experience that.

12. For personal growth

One of our most compelling reasons for travel is personal growth. How could we not grow in just about every facet? Exposing ourselves to (and immersing ourselves in) cultures and environments and experiences that we have never, ever experienced, pretty much guarantees exponential growth in all the great character traits we want to develop (such as empathy, compassion and patience to name a very few) if we’re willing to put in the work. And we are willing because we are both very aware of the kind of people we want to be.

13. For the warm weather

I know! Shallow, right? But it’s true, and I had to put it in here! We’re just so tired of the cold. I grew up in Newfoundland and Wayne in Nova Scotia, and with the exception of the last two years, we’ve spent all our lives in the Maritimes. If you don’t know what Maritime weather is like, basically there’s a long, cold and wet fall, a long, cold and snowy winter, and often a long, cool wet spring. I’m really trying to be more positive, so I’ll put it this way: we really like the sun and prefer warmth to cold!

14. Because we can!

Why not? What is holding us back? Why would we choose not to experience everything we want to experience, if we can and there is no reason not to? Why would we not want to learn and grow and stretch ourselves and live a life we want to live?

Conclusion

There are just so many benefits to travelling: it can improve your intellect, health and fitness, social life, quality of life, love relationship, your character traits…the list goes on and on!

We believe that travel, if done mindfully and purposefully, can help anyone become the very best version of themselves, and who doesn’t want that?!

Are you travelling, or planning to travel soon? What are your favorite reasons to travel? Drop a comment below; we’d love to hear from you!