Inspiration – Page 2 – A World of Media

May 31, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Embodying Our Beliefs

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.

May 29, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Don’t Always be Right

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.

May 24, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Stop Seeking Approval

Self-worth is a value that is often lacking among our more important attributes. It can lead to depression, low self-esteem and even missing out on opportunities because we’re just not confident enough to engage in worthwhile challenges.

These effects, of course, have further problems and add to even more negative points in our lives. But it is important to know that we are not alone when we begin to doubt ourselves.

Click the image to visit the photo album.

No matter what you tell yourself, no matter what your closest friends tell you and no matter what the stranger sitting across from you says, we all feel self-doubt from time to time. How much and how often generally depend on a lot of environmental factors that may not even have anything to do with us or our level of accomplishment.

In the farthest reaches of this world, this issue is prevalent. And even then, there is also the emotional opposite of this particular level of self-consciousness: over-confidence.

In either of these extremes, there is one characteristic that links them both and which is undeniable — once we know what we’re looking at.

What you’re worth becomes much clearer once you’ve found out where your limits are. Traveling, by way of expanding our horizons, gives us a direct line into that better, more expanded version of ourselves. And once we look back over that amazing mountain that we’ve just climbed, or trace our fingers over the map delineating the long trek we just made, our level of self-worth seems just as large and impressive as the feat itself.

Therefore it is not only a natural effect that travelers are, themselves, better people than what they left at home, but that they also begin to see that they have a much greater sense of what they can achieve for themselves. Seeking the approval of others, then, becomes about as useful as the pair of hiking boots that they destroyed after 5,000 miles of hikes through distant lands and over many mountains.

And, metaphorically speaking, the approval of others served its purpose for us when we were in these previous shoes. Shedding them and donning our new shoes, however, is what is necessary and ultimately inevitable, the “further” we go in our lives.

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Like the image from this article? Visit the photo 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.

May 22, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Learning to Stop Apologizing

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.

Sapa2CrBW_resize (2) — Pensive Passion in Sapa Valley, Vietnam.

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.

May 17, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: The Balance of Calm and Chaos

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.

HundredIslands022_resize — Boats at low tide in Hundred Islands National Park, Alaminos, Philippines.

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.

May 15, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Making More of the Trek by Sharing

Having a million miles under our belt doesn’t make us conscientious travelers. Having been to all the continents doesn’t prove us worthy of everyone’s company. Just because we’ve braved a couple of mountains, it doesn’t grant us immunity from humanity on the ground.

Many of us have learned that we can travel to great places without physically moving a single foot — and this may well hold greater potential for growth than those who have endless frequent flyer miles in their preferred flyer account.

The insights and wisdom that we’re granted on the road follows each of us who have made occasion to take a personally challenging journey. So it goes without saying that these experiences remain with us throughout our periods of rest away from the trail.

As we travel we’re undoubtedly thrust into other peoples’ worlds. This never fails to offer each of us the opportunity of learning a new way of life for others. Taking advantage of these situations should therefore include being a part of these peoples’ lives as much as they will allow us.

Sitting on a bus surrounded by locals is not just a way to get from point A to point B. Eating at a roadside restaurant with only the cook and a dusty road for company is never just a time to replenish the food stores. And passing natives as we trek through their foreign lands is not limited to simply staying focused on the road underfoot.

These are times when we can engage the people whose country we’re enjoying. Sharing of ourselves not only invites others to do so as well, but also forms a pattern of being open to receiving that which others are eager to share. And keeping this mentality at the forefront of our travels will do countless amounts of good in forming the larger pattern of embracing others when our trek is over.

This way of thinking not only affords us the highlights of traveling and sharing more intimate connections with the amazing people of this world, it also brings more of our experience back with us and in a more profound way.

Think about taking one of two vacations: One will find you on a beautiful beach, lounging around in the sun; on the other, you get to go camping with a local tribe in the hills of wherever. Which one would you choose?

Before you answer think about this: We can probably pretty quickly think of large a body of water in our home country. We can even catch a sun tan on our balcony back home. But we’ll likely never get another chance at getting an insider’s peak at an amazing and mysterious culture that awaits within that hill tribe.

Why not use your time abroad to have a deeper experience with those who know their country best? Share of yourself and also invite others in. Create an environment of open and embracing exchange. And not only will you feel more fulfilled by your time traveling, those who shared it with you will come to know that much more about your culture as well.

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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 journal. Leave your comments below.

May 10, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Goal-Focused on the Go

For some the biggest benefit of travel is the time to distance ourselves, both metaphorically and physically, from the life we have back home. For whatever reason this came into play, we obviously needed this time to collect ourselves and recharge the batteries.

Putting a focal point to our release from the past patterns of our lives has a lot to do with the angle and theme of the trip at hand. And the variables that accompany the plan and the execution of even a single trip can be so daunting that we often get lost in those details and forget the original point of the trip.

Taiwan's Alishan vista — Taiwan’s Alishan vista

So how can we keep focus in a time of flux?

The best answer would be to remain mindful of our goals. To do this effectively, we should first determine how we remember things. This will help us find creative ways of remaining centered on our original objectives.

Are we more visual, and could therefore benefit from writing down our goals? Should we bring along a journal and add a writing theme to our trip to help us record how or if we’re doing what we set out to do? Is there perhaps someone coming with us who is better at memorizing our important items? Or would we be better off bringing a handheld recorder to use for keeping on track and reflecting our thoughts?

The key to remembering often isn’t the vehicle that we use to drive our focus forward, but rather simply being proactive. Taking action will do more to steady our minds about our goals, because we’re taking an active role in achieving them. And even the slightest conscious effort of maintaining focus is worth a hundred pages in a diary that discuss the same things. Five minutes of putting our bodies to work in an effort of accomplishing our aims is equivalent to ten times that amount of daydreaming out the office window.

Put your thoughts into action and your efforts will pay you back in remaining on task no matter what your travel plans or challenges.

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Like the photo from this journal? Visit the album HERE.

May 8, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Finding Value in Talent

More than at any other time in our lives, traveling reveals both our strengths and our weaknesses – and the varying levels of each.

Only a small fraction of what we know from school, dating, professional life, social customs and just about any other situation that we’ve learned from throughout our lives will serve us any good when on the road in a different part of the world.

But this should never intimidate us, because in all the other times in our lives, we were simply learning how to act, what to say or how to land that dream job. Out in the foreign wilds, the things that we’ll find out are more akin to our personal level of creativity, or tact, our street smarts and, of course, our talents.

Taiwan's Lotus Lake at Night — Taiwan’s Lotus Lake at Night

Forget your high school jam band. Playing guitar in the talent show makes strumming for a village full of wide-eyed tribal onlookers seem like the season finale of American Idol. Your last uncomfortable date will pale in comparison to being hit on by a Muslim woman and worrying if you’re to be hung at the gallows by sunrise. And that time that you said the wrong thing at the board meeting will seem as frivolous as the tie you were wearing that day when faced with realizing that you’ve just offended the local religious leader by having accidentally made the most horrendous hand gesture known to this part of the world.

Every semester of ethics classes you ever took will be as useful as the first drop of sweat that escapes your brow in situations like these. In this way, the phrase “in the heat of the jungle” doesn’t always apply to temperature. And quick learning happens in moments like these. So they will undoubtedly leave us with the most firmly planted lessons and the most magnificent memories that we’ll likely ever experience.

Academic diplomas take us years to complete, while our creative insights flex like lean muscles after just a month on the road. And what we learn out there could never be taught in the classroom. The reason for this is that what we learn comes from within us. And we are the only facilitators of our own creativity. We find it in ourselves, we use it in our actions and we learn from it in an ever-expanding vocation of life-sized applications.

Make no mistake; the value of our talents cannot be measured in the world of academia. Yet they benefit us far greater, stay with us far longer and continue to teach us farther into our lives than even the most expensive and prestigious schools on earth.

Our talents are all our own. And while we’re busy learning about these intangible places in ourselves, the world is much the better for our efforts in bringing our talents abroad and learning in tandem with the experiences that we all share along the way.

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

May 1, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Avoiding Negative People

Along this journey of life, we encounter people who seem to require that we meet their standard or that they perhaps don’t have time for us. But you don’t have to travel far to meet these types of people. In fact, I’d bet that we can think of two or three people like this right off the top of our heads.

We could spend our entire lives wondering why we just aren’t good enough for these individuals. Or we could realize that we, as independent people, are likely not the only ones that don’t quite cut the mustard for them. And in these cases, it is very easy to understand how their dissatisfaction with us is not limited to those other individuals in this person’s circle. Indeed, these types of people are also likely very dissatisfied with themselves.

Shit Shed_resize — Click the image for the photo album

When looking at this problem with this in mind, it’s almost immediate that we conjure up compassion for them. Knowing that they are stuck in a cycle of negativity and that they are only hurting themselves in their negative plight, is part of understanding that it is up to us to ensure that we take responsibility for our own satisfaction and happiness in this life. And the moment that we realize that someone else seems to require us to provide them with the same satisfaction and happiness, we get a glimpse of their lack of ability to provide that for themselves.

From many years on the road, lessons like these seem commonplace. Meeting people of various cultures, nationalities, races, beliefs: this is a universal characteristic of people the world over. Everyone is chasing after happiness. Even those who seem never to have it in their lives.

While it may seem unorthodox, by complaining and even inviting drama into one’s life, people who act in this way do find some satisfaction from, at the very minimum the relief that they get feeling like their problems are greater than someone else’s if they can manifest the cycle of negativity that impulsively creates that reality for others. By casting out this attitude to others that their problems are less profound than theirs, or by painting the picture that even the slightest problem is so terrible that they just can’t stand it, they are underpinning the notion that they are ultimately “above” or “better than” these items. Therefore, they claim the right to cast their judgment over the entirety of whatever issue is at hand.

Understanding that people have these shortcomings on the global level will also help us to understand on the local level just what it is that drives the pattern of negativity in the lives of those who thrive on it and set it in motion by spreading gossip to others about it.

No matter where you go, this will always be a part of life. But if you know what it looks like (or worse; if you are in this cycle yourself), you can easily avoid it and start to look at things more positively.

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Like the image from this post? Check out the album from Alaska HERE.

April 29, 2013

Insights from the Pavement: Meeting Yourself along the Way

If done right, traveling will instill in the traveler the right mix of confidence and real-world experiences that garner never ending personal growth.

Travel, for many people, is a glamorous, unreachable activity they search for their entire lives. In some cases, it’s a motivator. In others, it’s “just not the right time.”

Whatever the conclusion, it always seems to reward those who engage in it. And it treats us to myriad lessons and replenishes our drive.

At least, this is what people “just know” about those who have traveled – it’s the persona that experienced travelers carry with them that shines through. People know that it took a lot of courage to leave the comforts of home in exchange for the rocky shores of the unknown. And for this reason travel is seen the world over as very a coveted and enticing activity.

BontocTerraces1_resize — Click the image for the photo album

What people must be learning on their treks abroad is also something that people back home are intrigued by. Finding a “favorite country” or answering questions like “weren’t you scared,” or “how did you handle [that challenge]” are among the many indicators that people in the stay-at-home community are truly curious about the wilds of the foreign world.

Eventually, every traveler is faced with challenges on the road that they simply never had the ability to plan for when preparing for their journey. This is one of the many things that separate those who do travel from those who want to travel. But once you’re out there, nothing stands in between the traveler and these inevitable, life-changing challenges. Traveling removes this buffer by throwing the traveler into a foreign place where their tools have been stripped away and everything they have learned is practically useless.

The type of savvy and wit that works in our native lands does little to overcome obstacles that defy even our most commonly tackled problems in our home lives. And it’s challenges like these that allow us to realize that the tools that we use to make our everyday lives easier, may well be shields that we actually use to shelter us from seeing what we’re really made of.

And in that, traveling allows us the opportunity to metaphorically “shake hands” with the person who navigates difficult waters without the use and convenience of our previous box of tools.

Thinking on our feet, critically assessing threatening situations, quickly finding exits and myriad other resources are among the many wonderful tools that traveling brings us. But none are more important than the moment when we dust ourselves off, look back upon our last sensational achievement and realize that we have just met the real person within.

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