By Madison Butkus
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Sponsored by the Tewksbury Public Library, the Dover Town Library (DTL) shared an online event this past Thursday, February 1st, “How to Travel More (and Better).” During this presentation, author Colin Wright talked about his personal experiences traveling the world full- time, how to think about travel as a type of concept, how to work vacation time into any lifestyle, and additionally shared some resources to help make anyone's travel ambitions into a reality.
According to DTL’s website, “Wright has written a few dozen books, hosts a trio of podcasts, and speaks to audiences around the world on a variety of subjects. He started traveling full time in 2009, living out of a carry-on bag while his readers voted on which country he would move to next, every four months. He’s since visited more than 60 countries and all 48 contiguous United States (at least three times a piece). He currently lives in Milwaukee, where he has a home base from which to travel.”
At the ripe age of 24 years old, Wright made the brave decision to sell all of his belongings, keeping only those that could fit into a carry-on, and travel around the world. He realized that his corporate job was adding an enormous amount of stress into his life, and he wanted to live his dream of traveling everywhere and anywhere that he could.
During his travels, he explained his new found love for the world around him and how his expectations were always challenged when arriving at a new place. “I was able to soak up a whole lot of these different cultures and lifestyles. I was able to see different versions of myself and who I was in these different settings. I was able to meet just an incredible abundance of different people who have lived very different lives than I have. And each and everyone of these experiences and encounters was enriching because it allowed me to add to myself and my perception of myself but then also challenge everything that I thought I knew about myself, other people, the world, my beliefs, my understandings, my goals, absolutely everything. And that to me is part of the value of travel in that moving around, even if you are just hopping on a train or a bus, you are able to expand your horizons in a very dramatic and substantial way that then has many effects on the rest of your life,” Wright explained.
In order to prioritize travel into our lives, Wright suggests that we should think of travel as a concept in which there are three main thoughts. The first one being that we travel for an array of different reasons including food, culture, religion, etc., and there is no wrong reason to travel. The second is that we have assumptions about travel like it might be too expensive, it should only happen so often, etc., but it certainly does not have to be that way. Any type of travel can be casual and inexpensive as long as it is enjoyable and stress free. The third and final thought is that travel overall is very valuable and can be easily woven into our lives with the right tools and management.
When incorporating travel into our lives, Wright explains that the benefits of doing so include getting exposure to novelty, a way to break your everyday routine, and to expand one’s context on the many things we may not know about. To help achieve these benefits and add any sort of travel into our schedules, Wright suggests taking mini, low-cost vacations as much as we can. For bigger travel experiences, he encourages everyone to utilize their smartphones as much as possible, using things like Google flights, Virbo, Airbnb, Google Translate, Mango Languages, and more.
No matter where you go and/or how long you are there for, Wright stresses the importance of travel and the benefits it can bring not only to our mental health but our physical health as well. He implores us to roll with the punches wherever we go, and just enjoy the world around us as much as we can. For more information about Colin Wright, please visit his website at colin.io.
