Traveling for some people is considered as a means of ‘escape’ from all the stressful things in this world. I remember the first time I was desperate to travel out of town by myself to escape my daily life as a student which was very tiring at the time. Being chased by assignment deadlines, busy activities in the student activity unit that I joined made me stressed and decided to take a break by traveling out of town. I was used to learning from lecturers, books, articles or journals. I rarely really learned from the community, because I spent most of my time on campus. Therefore, traveling outside the city at that time made me learn things that I had never learned in college.
When I was in my third semester, I chose to take the train to Jakarta for a small fee, because at that time I was only thinking of going for no more than 5 days. I racked my brains, looking for ways to survive and adapt to a completely unfamiliar environment. I repeatedly got lost in the small alleys of Jakarta, and I also had to choose an affordable vehicle to get around the capital city at that time. Every step I took back then, I realized that it was a challenge, and every mistake I made back then was a valuable lesson.
This real world we see is not the same as the theories we read and listen to. When I travel, I see how the world in different places really works. I who only study every day feel tired, but the reality of people’s lives out there is even more exhausting. Through traveling, I learned that it’s not easy for everyone to live a decent life. I learned that being tired of studying means nothing when we start working later.
From traveling, I saw for myself how some people struggle desperately to be able to support their families, how a little tip from me can be a smile of happiness and endless gratitude for someone. This may be mentioned in theory or research articles, but when confronted directly, it becomes more meaningful. This clarifies the sentence that learning can be gained while traveling.
However, the things I mentioned above do not make traveling the only way to learn about life. We still need academic understanding, theories and extensive knowledge, so that we also have an open mind. And that is coupled with traveling, where traveling makes us experience firsthand and feel things that we didn’t understand before. Traveling teaches us to understand this real life through a more real perspective, about how we can adapt to new environments, how we can interpret this life better.
So from this article, we know the answer to the question of whether traveling is the best way to learn about real life, the answer is yes for some people. And for me, traveling is my biggest classroom, and the hands-on experience I get is my ‘Best Teacher’. Because in reality, all the things that we will face later after we let go of our status as students cannot only be read from books or lecture materials, but we have to actually live it.
By: Amelia Pramais Sella
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