I Live to Travel

This may sound like a simplified bold statement, but it reflects the only truth of my life.

If I can put what we call “life” in a simplistic way, it is to experience.

It has always been like this for me. When I was as little as I could have a memory, I knew the entire purpose for life was to experience.

Then when I was 22, I had a boyfriend, who was 6 years older than I. I remember he lectured me very confidently that there was more to life than that. And he said, “Wait till you get older, you will know.”

A thought simply crossed my mind at that moment, “I will grow older, but what I already know now will not ‘grow’.”

It frustrated me to try to convince him that I actually did know what I was talking about and what I was wanting for my life. I didn’t know then, but I know now, that I actually never ever need to convince anybody when it comes to living my life, knowing what I know.

And I grew into my 30’s. I had some friends, back in China, who considered themselves elite, socially and academically speaking. Some of them challenged me about this simplistic purpose of life – To experience.

“What then after you ‘experience’?” They ask.

“There is no ‘then’. Experiencing is it.”

I’ve got one single-hobby in my life: Travelling, to the point I feel in my heart that it was the only thing that matters, and that defines me.

It’s not that I had to go on and on travelling, though I’d never refuse that idea, but that life is geared up around travelling. You can call it vacation or holiday. I call it lifestyle. It’s not about learning, gaining, even exploring. It is more than any of those. It is about life asking me to step that way and no other ways could make me feel that way.

I’d develop homesickness towards places that I had never been to.

I am the most alive when I am on the road.

I make way too many more friends when I travel than I do in the city I live. Those friends don’t last though. And that’s the point. I am never good at maintaining friendship, but I am way too good at making instant friends, especially when I am at a brand new place.

In the days I didn’t have anything, I had enough money to buy a train ticket or a flight ticket. And I’d manage it and find myself again on the road.

Over the years, I have finally made it to be okay to have this very “limited” interest to own for one lifetime.

Yet life does get better than that. When hypnotherapy found me, it has become one of the best things in my life. It enables me to continue to meet new people in my practice, make instant connections, and be taken on a ride, into a new territory into their richness and wonder of the mind. This profession suits me beyond my childhood imaginations.

And this profession enables me to travel, not only to new places on the planet earth more freely whenever I want to, but also to the YOU-niverse within. The experiences I get out of all these are forever fresh and new. This is it. There is no “then”.