Category: Reflection

While visiting new places, we don’t always have the benefit of relying on our previous scope of reading body language and facial triggers to get the true sense of what people in other cultures are used to portraying.

In the steppe of the Himalayas, clapping hands is used to ward off evil – so that group of tribal people is not welcoming you with applause.  In the mountains near the Golden Triangle, folding hands together while overlapping the fingers is a sign that you would like to have sex – not that you’re simply waiting contently for your bus.  And unconsciously holding your hands out to shape your frustration at the border in Malaysia will tell the guard that you are trying to affront him and take away his power.  And none of these instances will certainly do any good in aiding your cause.

Even the most common and lifelong mannerisms that we know from back home will serve up only confusion and mistranslated initiatives on the road.  So it is important that we take the time to research these possible losses in translation, watch others for what they do and try to pose as little a threat as possible while navigating this new world of foreign expectations.

Often we just don’t think about the gestures and subconscious language that we are using to transmit our ideas.  And while it is difficult to know just how we will come across to the people of new cultures, it is also important to simply remain continuously aware and cognizant of our movements, tone and general presentation.

The more time we spend being mindful of your personal expression and presentation to others, the more we become aware of how we come across in our home lives.  And this lesson will continue to benefit us as we will undoubtedly engage a countless array of personalities throughout our lifetimes.  And while it’s not possible to know how someone will react to you based on their own personal opinions and perspectives, it’s at least possible to be chary of our own intentions throughout these interactions.

Insider’s info: On the road, I have learned many universal no-nos.  Here are a few:

1. Never raise your voice – no matter how frustrated you are.
2. Never move directly at someone or offer your hands to them (unless to assist someone) – no matter how innocent your intentions – unless it is done to you first.
3. Making direct eye contact is both expected and considered rude, depending on where you are – find out beforehand.
4. The clothing that you wear (or don’t wear), as well as tattoos/piercings that you may have may directly conflict with local cultures, beliefs or traditions.
5. Public displays of affection are best avoided.
6. The oldest male of a particular group is normally the most respected. Don’t piss him off.
7. Don’t spit, litter, trespass or eliminate on city or private lands.
8. Never do drugs under any circumstances while traveling.
9. Smiling is sometimes seen as a less-than-honorable invitation. Find out beforehand.
10. If someone bows to you, try and reciprocate in the same manner (eye contact/eyes down, hands together/at the hips/together around the face, etc.).

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Like this photo from this journal? Check out the album HERE.

My new book, Insights from the Pavement, is a collection of 101 Travel Oms just like this one. Look for it to be released soon.

Join the conversation, tell me what you think about this idea. Leave your comments below.

Simply saying thank you for what we have instead of being ungrateful for what we don’t, is oftentimes the difference between finding out we are very satisfied or very unsatisfied with our lives.  Both cycles are easy to get into.  And both offer equal amounts of inertia toward their respective ends.

There are many factors that contribute to why we would be unthankful for any given situation.  But rather than note those, why not try and establish a positive way to assess them?  Even in looking at the less-than-positive items in our lives, we are still able to see them from a place of positivity – or at least progress.  In either case, we will find ourselves with the opportunity to appreciate the good fortune that our lives have the capacity to generate – even if it doesn’t generate it quite yet.

But the important thing is to make the conscious effort to analyze these centers within ourselves.  Forgetting to take the time to appreciate the richness that exists in our lives is one way that we lose sight of just how great things are – or more importantly, how they could always be much worse.

Just like having a negative cycle of doubt, hate, depression, disorder and anxiety can feel like a cage from which it is impossible to escape, the extent of this cycle on the positive end is equally intense – liberating us with the same magnitude as it would at weighing us down.  And when we feel continually tired, overreactive or sad, we generally see things in a negative light.

While on the road, we can look at our trip for all the confusion, frustration and wasted time that we spent trying to navigate the trail.  Travel always includes circumstances that have this effect.  On the other hand, there are also many times that we have the opportunity to be awed by a beautiful vista or to experience the exhilaration of something new.  And the latter normally outnumbers the prior.

The point is that if we look for the negative, the negative will appear more acute than the positive.  But there is one stark difference in the way that we react to these two polar opposites.

When focusing on the negative outcomes of our challenges, we almost always take on the perspective of someone who doesn’t deserve it.  We often ask ourselves, “why did this happen to me?” as if we are somehow more deserving than someone else in the same circumstances to receive a more positive result.  This is a common reaction, but it’s not a place of humility.  It is a place we go to when we are defeated and our ego takes over in order to protect our pride.

So, armed with this knowledge, we can easily head this negative cycle off at the pass.  Viewing the positive outcomes intrinsic to every possible situation would be a good place to start.  Being thankful for what you have is a great finisher.  And when we find ourselves being thankful, even when the situation would strike most people as quite negative, that is when we know we have achieved humility.

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Like this photo from this journal? Check out the album HERE.

My new book, Insights from the Pavement, is a collection of 101 Travel Oms just like this one. Look for it to be released soon.

Join the conversation, tell me what you think about this idea. Leave your comments below.

It’s true that not all of the things we buy are for ourselves.  On the road we often buy gifts and souvenirs for others.  But in cases like these, do you think that your loved ones would appreciate a trinket that doesn’t symbolize anything they know, or something that you made along the way?

I won’t go down the road of begrudging those who buy souvenirs for their loved ones back home – I, myself, find it almost impossible to travel and not see things in terms of how much my friends and relatives would enjoy them.  But I will say that these things become very cumbersome over the course of a trek.

Not only do these items take up space – which adds up quickly when we carry all our belongings with us – they also make our luggage heavier.  They cost money which we could ultimately be using to help ensure we are covered in the event of an emergency.  And honestly, do we really need more “stuff?”

Over the past decade, I’ve managed to create a world of media throughout my travels.  And if I have learned anything, it’s that a lot of reward can come from very little.  And almost always, the most creative gifts are already being made by those of us in the photographing, blogging, video-making world.  These digital items weigh nothing, cost nothing and are fun to make for our loved ones back home.  They are also environmentally friendly, they don’t use dyes, bleaches or costly materials.  And they even symbolize a perspective that no one else in the world will ever be able to capture or recreate.

But the best part about about giving the gift that can’t even be touched is that when we return home, we get to spend time communicating these wonderful memories to our loved ones.  After we have created these media, we then get to sit down with those who inspired their creation and relive the experience as many times as we want.

If you write on your journeys, write a poem that was inspired by your latest experience.  If you like to make videos for your website, why not film yourself at a new location and talk directly to those you’re thinking about?  If you have an eye for photography, snap a shot with you in front of that amazing place that made you wish your loved ones were there with you?  And if you want to print it up later, you can always send it off as a postcard.

I have created a dozen ebooks, hundreds of videos and more than 75,000 images in my time abroad.  And I am continually sharing them with my friends and family – many times posting them up on my social networks with notes to those who I was thinking about when I created them.  And these have gotten me more heart-felt responses from the recipients than any key chain or refrigerator magnet ever could.  And what’s more, I have a new experience to share with my loved ones because I created that moment with that very intention.

These items are intangible.  You can touch them.  They have no monetary value.  And they exist only in cyberspace as ones and zeros.  But they will create a greater impact than any commercial item that money can buy.  And they will forever stand as a frozen piece of time that can be enjoyed over and over.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t support the local economies by buying locally made goods.  But the next time you’re in the tourist shop, just think of what your friends and family might like to have from your time abroad.

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Like this photo from this journal? Check out the album HERE.

My new book, Insights from the Pavement, is a collection of 101 Travel Oms just like this one. Look for it to be released soon.

Join the conversation, tell me what you think about this idea. Leave your comments below.

Having had the humbling experience to visit with the multiplicity inherent to varied cultures of the world, it has occurred many times along the trail that belief drives many people’s actions.  This, of course, has the potential for extremely tragic and misguided consequences such as violence and bigotry.  But it also has the blossoming opportunity for the polar opposite; the caring, compassionate embracement of others.

Each of us believes something different – even if we claim the same religion.  We cherish different facets of our ethos others might not appreciate.  We dismiss items that others hold dear.  We even hold our beliefs with varying levels of philosophical value. There’s just no way for two people to believe the exact same thing.  And while this dispute is apparent in many current debates in the news and among various communities, it cannot be argued that it is impossible for anyone else to know exactly what we know inside our own heads.  We simply have no words for many of the feelings and the depth that each of us has within us.

With that in mind, it’s very easy to understand that if we value the right to believe what we want to believe in our own minds, we should therefore expect to offer that same right to others.  And therefore, if we were to infringe upon that privilege in others’ lives, we would not deserve to enjoy it, ourselves.

No matter what our belief structure happens to be, it’s always important to understand that others are not living out the same personal experience that we are facing in this life.  And the principles that we hold within ourselves are simply not valid for others.  Realizing and maintaining this perspective will do us much good in interacting with people of vastly differing cultural and religious backgrounds.

It may well be that the person across from us on the bus would just as soon not have us around.  But what would happen if we showed them that our religious or irreligious background had something positive to leave them with?  After all, it’s hard to stay mad at someone who’s being nice.

We don’t need to work very hard to express the more positive side of our heritage.  We need simply to understand that the same fears exist within others as within ourselves.  And while we may believe in our own minds that we know quite a lot, none of us has this universe figured out.  And until we do, we’re all just beings sharing resources and hoping for the best for ourselves and our loved ones.  It need be no more complicated than that.

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Like this photo from this journal? Check out the album HERE.

My new book, Insights from the Pavement, is a collection of 101 Travel Oms just like this one. Look for it to be released soon.

Join the conversation, tell me what you think about this idea. Leave your comments below.

Everyone has heard it: “You don’t always have to be right.”  This particular phrase has been around for a while.  And though I generally try to come up with unique content, I thought this one was due a reunification with the globetrotters out there.

Not always being right is a notion that has served me well many times on the road.  In fact, I can recall several instances of sitting at some train station somewhere and looking up from my book to see someone who hadn’t quite hammered in this ideology.  And there they were, quibbling over some mundane detail of their itinerary with their partner (or worse; the conductor).  They’d go on and on about how they were right and the other person was wrong.  They’d throw their hands up and raise their voice.

But does it really matter that much if you spent three extra dollars on your last meal?  Could it be that terrible that you could have visited the beach instead of the mountains?  And when was the last time that you honestly gave a crap about eating a bad meal one time out of hundreds?

You saved up money for this trip – spend it.  You came here to see new things – beaches or mountains or waterfalls or whatever: it’s all a bonus because you haven’t seen it before.  And you can always choose something else on the menu next time.  But for now, you know what broiled cobra tastes like in Vietnam.

Many times we get so caught up in the confusion of time tables and the frustration of possibly over-spending that we seem to lay all the rest to the wayside.  This is even more profound a sentiment when traveling with a romantic partner.  Along with stripping away the tools in our “back-home tool boxes,” traveling also strips away our politeness and patience.  So we’re left exposed as the real people that we are inside.

Having this knowledge beforehand will undoubtedly serve us well as we gallivant the globe.  But there’s also something more.  We should take with us those lessons, but also remember that it’s not so much important to be correct in every decision that we make on the road.  We’ll make many bad decisions before we’ve found out how to be comfortable in this new place.  We’ll eat the wrong food, spend way too much on this thing or that thing, we’ll make the wrong turn on the map and wind up in the opposite direction and we’ll even look around us and truly believe that these people just have it in for us and they want us to fail.

The key to letting go of all of these inevitably frustrating circumstances is to understand that there are, many times, situations that we simply can’t control, have foreknowledge of or be able to do right the very first time.  And even if we did know everything we needed to know, we don’t have to be so callous as to gloat about it or deride others in an effort to simply prove ourselves right.

After all, when we look back on a situation from the point in time where we have concluded our time on that particular road, we’ll only remember these frustrations as times that taught us to be the person we are today.

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Like this photo from this journal? Check out the album HERE.

My new book, Insights from the Pavement, is a collection of 101 Travel Oms just like this one. Look for it to be released soon.

Join the conversation, tell me what you think about this idea. Leave your comments below.

Many times in our lives, we feel compelled to take on the perspective of someone who should be sorry for circumstances that often are not our fault.  This happens for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes it’s to simply alleviate pressure from a tense situation, sometimes it’s to avoid a conflict.  Most of the time, it’s just to take a detour around continuing what could otherwise be an uncomfortable situation.

Whatever the case in each situation that this takes place, we can be sure that we need to begin to be mindful of how often we use this tack.

As many a traveler will say, sometimes we make decisions that land us in a less than optimal situation.  Not only is this inevitable due to our inability to read every circumstantial element around us, to know the future and to understand the agenda or motivation of those around us; it’s also necessary.

As we travel on the physical plane from place to place, or on the metaphorical plane from situation to situation, we are undoubtedly faced with situations where there are endless motivating factors that may, at times, work against us to create difficult conditions.  But while it’s impossible to know the end results of every possible choice we might make in these situations, it is possible for us to be conscious of how we internalize them.

While traveling, we bump into one another, intrude on privacy, interact with resentful, uneducated or even deeply ethnocentric people who may be displeased simply by our presence in their homeland.  But in all of these cases, it is never about you as a person.

If we think back to the last time someone cut us off while driving or gave us a dirty look at the grocery store, we can, with great certainty, recall that we didn’t know these people – it was a random passing of a stranger with whom we didn’t share any previous negativity.  This may not have stopped us from being deeply offended by their actions.  But, just as we don’t know enough about the other person to have anything personal against them, we should always keep in mind that this was not personally directed at us.  And these actions speak more to their place in life than our own.

Having been to enough places to realize that I may not be wanted in the host country, I have come to realize that it is not me that they don’t want in their town.  It’s simply a foreigner that they don’t want around.  And this takes a lot of the pressure off me to feel sorry for having offended someone for having done nothing other than be present.  And looking back on these times, the prejudices of others have never burdened my travels, but rather reminded me of how the next visitor to my home might feel if I am less than welcoming.

After all, how much could simply your presence possibly offend someone?  There’s almost always something else at work.  And it’s rarely your self that is the problem.

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Like the photo from this journal?  Check out the album HERE.

Insights from the Pavement is a new style of blog that I am trying out.  These will be posted a couple times per week for the next few months.  And I am interested in what my readers and passersby think of them.  So be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

One of the many pleasures of travel is that it takes us out of the daily grind, removes us from the office and whisks us away to a new and exciting place.  The joy that comes to us even before we leave is largely centered on that very idea.  And as our travel date approaches we often find ourselves lost in our thoughts of what this change from the norm will provide for us.

It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that we as a species need bouts of change in our routine.  For some, this change needs to be constant and continuous.  For others, only a random smattering of island hopping over the course of a decade will do.  But for most of us, breaking up the routine is something best timed on a yearly basis.

This begs the question; how do we know what kind of change and in what quantity is good for us?

My experience of resisting the urge to shake things up from time to time has left me feeling empty and anxious – needing something more.  Once I learned what that feeling was, it was easy to keep track of the pattern and how to plan for heading it off at the pass.

Of course, this particular rationale has the potential to help us deal with other patterns in our lives.  But it’s safe to say that working on overcoming restlessness and satiating our hunger for discovery will assist in taking care of many of these other needs that our bodies are sure to tell us about.

While on the road, there is nothing resembling the schedules that we hold in our at-home lives.  So it’s easy to see how this affords us a clear view of what’s left behind when the road has finished stripping away all that may have confused the message that our body was trying to convey.

So how do we come to understand these messages while still in our everyday grind?  The best option that I have come to find is ironically a time when I placed myself back into my at-home patterns through meditation.

While spending three sweltering days meditating with Zen monks at a monastery in Southern Thailand, I came upon a mental clearing which wasn’t easy to find, mixed in with all the rubbish that I hadn’t attended to in years.  I found that my body had missed the comforts of a well-planned routine.  And because I’d been traveling for many months by that time, I had never thought to look back into my old life where I was locked into a pattern devoid of any creativity.

In this routine, I’d wake up, do my morning stuff, prepare for work, head out and come home with the hope of having enough energy of making it through a movie before I passed out and awoke to do it all over again.

As mundane and underwhelming as that sounds, my body came to know it as a facet of safety for me.  If I had to plan each day from scratch knowing that I was in a new place with new eating, traveling and working schedules in the lives of the locals, my routine back home would serve me no benefit whatsoever.  And so because I was lost in this months-long pattern of incessant planning, practicing and executing, I never took time to notice that I’d given up that feeling of safety for my experiences on the road.

Perhaps it’s difficult to understand the dynamic that exists in this particular situation.  But simply put, my body was freaking out at what seemed to be a never-ending cycle of input without any sense of structure.  And in this way, I could see how the exact opposite would be true of my life in the rat race.  I’d have the same messages from my body, except they would be about the notion of needing something to break up that incessant regularity.

Having the right balance of roots and wings will do us the most good in finding out what and when our bodies are telling us important things.  Sitting quietly and making time to reflect on our day or week will create the best opportunity for us to listen to ourselves, to become in tune with the oscillation of our ins-and-outs, ebbs-and-flows and tos-and-fros.

Being able to whisk away and find adventure in the limitless dreamscape of the mind aids us in times of rest, while centering on inaction and motionless peace drives a ground rod through our chaotic moment on the move.  And in that, balance can be achieved anywhere we happen to be, simply by creating chaos out of quiet and stillness from disorder.

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Like the photo from this journal?  Check out the album HERE.

Insights from the Pavement is a new style of blog that I am trying out.  These will be posted a couple times per week for the next few months.  And I am interested in what my readers and passersby think of them.  So be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments section.