Traveling and reading: pleasures without risks

Benefits of travel

To put it simply, there are at least five good reasons that should lead us to consider travel, in any organizational form, as an unmissable event, at least twice a year.

• The trip it's an authentic gym brainIt keeps it in shape, stimulates it, and thus increases our creativity. When traveling, we must make an effort to adapt to new languages, habits, and lifestyles. And this helps develop so-called lateral thinking, the tool with which we can find quick solutions to unexpected problems.
• Travel It naturally encourages tolerance. The people we meet are often different, and while we might be inclined to judge them, the more we travel, the more we learn to relate to others. Without grading, and with an open mind about diversity.
• Travel means know without prejudice: an attitude already known to Homo erectus, who appeared in Africa just under two million years ago, and to Homo sapiens, who discovered all lands, driven not only by economic interests (for example, opening new trade routes), but also by scientific curiosity and the desire to go down in history.
• The trip relaxes, and helps a lot to get rid of stress. This is demonstrated by the fact that, already shortly after departure, the values blood pressure They tend to normalize, partly due to the breaks from the work-related stresses we face every day. Eighty percent of travelers report returning with improved mood.
• The trip, with its spring made of Curiosity, it helps our self-esteem, leads us to know ourselves better from the inside and helps us develop organizational skills that we may not have known we had.

If travel is knowledge, the resulting open-mindedness is almost automatic. You can immediately recognize people who have traveled a lot: they are more tolerant and curious, they always have something new. doubt They are capable of holding conversations of all kinds, regardless of topic. Traveling opens the mind like a little box, as it exposes us to some form of diversity and forces us to adapt our lifestyles to other customs. We are less alone and closer to the diversity of humanity. Travel is also deeply formative. For a couple of centuries, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great European aristocracy was formed through the Grand Tour, the fascinating journey the young scions of these families took to discover the places, history, and personalities of continental Europe, starting with Bella Italia. The destination, as the poet Ungaretti said, is secondary; the important thing is the departure.

Breaking the routine

Travel, and here too the destination becomes secondary, allows us to break the routine, thus breaking the chains of boredom to which we are often tied not so much by discipline or even conviction, but merely by automatisms and habits. And the moment in which this break, so useful for feeling better, occurs is not the moment of departure, but is perceived long beforehand, in the very planning of the trip. Feel free to approach it as you wish, allow for some mistakes, and don't ignore the potential surprises: these unknowns, too, are part of the pleasure of travel.

Famous quotes about travel

• "Traveling, along with reading and listening, is always the most useful and shortest way to reach oneself." John Brock

The travel-reading-listening triangle is a fundamental key to enjoying life to its fullest. And to delve deeper, without superficiality and with a healthy lightness in human relationships. But it is also the key to opening the often-locked door of our heart and soul.

• "The goal is to leave" Cesare Ungaretti

It's never where you go that matters, but how you travel. Ugly places can leave a much deeper mark than earthly paradises, even though they impress us. The key to travel is the journey, from departure to arrival. The rest comes later.

• "The person who leaves on a journey is never the same person who returns." Authorless

Given the enormity of factors that travel brings into play, it is impossible to return exactly as you left. Travel It also means evolving, becoming someone else, different from who you were before. And, hopefully, better.

• "He who wishes to travel happily must travel light." Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The lightness we are talking about here is not just that of the luggage, which if it is too bulky makes the journey more complicated. It is the lightness Calvinian, of men who move like swallows, gliding over things, without indifference, but also with the necessary distance to avoid being trapped by them.