The Real Reason You’re Happier When You Travel
It’s not about where you go, but what you leave behind
It is a truism that travel broadens your horizons. Like most truisms, it is only partly true. Yes, travel expands your world, but it does so by shrinking it.
I was reminded of this delicious paradox recently when I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time: checked into a hotel. A DoubleTree, it wasn’t especially luxurious, and definitely not exotic, located less than a mile from my house near Washington, D.C. But as I swiped my key card and entered the room, sanitized for my convenience, I exhaled. I could think again.
It wasn’t what the hotel offered that explained my elation but what it lacked — namely a houseful of crap, literal as well as figurative, thanks to a sewage “situation” that, trust me, you don’t want to know about. This, I thought, is why I travel — not to expand my life but to shrink it. Contain it. At home, clutter — both the physical and mental variety — threatens to suffocate me. Not so in hotel rooms like this. Travel liberates me from…. well, from myself. Unencumbered, I can breathe again.
The traveler jettisons excess stuff for the same reason a hot-air balloonist jettisons ballast: to soar higher.
