Going Places

by Francine Seno
Discussed Text: Wallace, "This Is Water"

My favorite text so far has been David Foster Wallace’s commencement address, where I learned that to fully experience is to venture outside of one’s comfort zone and into an “unknown”, to willingly step out of one’s bubble, to shake oneself out of one’s bland, routine-centered lives and into somewhere one has never gone before. To escape one’s natural default setting requires a conscious effort to shift or to go beyond one’s perspective, to think twice and even question one’s certainties.

This insight is very significant to me as it has so much to do with my one genuine passion in life: traveling.

In no way do I consider myself “well-traveled” – I’ve only traveled a total of 6 times in my life abroad. Locally speaking, I’ve only been to 3 places outside of Manila. Although my experience with traveling may seem limited, I would say that those trips have changed me as a person in ways I didn't know they would and I feel very blessed to have been given a glimpse of the world so early in my life.

When I travel, I get to leave my beliefs and my certainties at home. I am able to see and examine everything I thought I knew in a different light and angle. Going someplace different from your home country enables you to shake up your complacencies though seeing strikingly different situations than those you experience at home. You are awakened in various ways when you find yourself dealing with something that’s far from your daily realities.

Abroad, we are not seen the way we are at home: we are wonderfully free of labels, of social class, of standing, of whatever reputation we may hold back there. Here in this foreign place, nobody knows your name. And precisely because we are freed of these inessential labels, we have the chance and the freedom to come into contact with the more essential parts of ourselves. A lot of people claim to feel more alive when they are far from home.

Of course, it’s not all about what we get from the places we visit, but also what we bring, and leave behind. As tourists, we also carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go. We also have the opportunity to enrich and to impart valuable things to the new cultures we encounter.

In a nutshell, traveling changes us by exposing to us new sights, issues, dilemmas and realities or those that we might otherwise ignore. Traveling also exposes us to parts of ourselves we’ve never discovered before - when we travel places, we also travel to new moods, emotions, states of mind or some “hidden places” inside of us.  Traveling is a quest not just for the unknown, but the unknowing: we may travel not only in search of answers, but of better questions as well.