It was my first international flight alone.

I rubbed my sweaty palms against my jeans. The flight attendant called my group, and as I watched my parents disappear behind strange faces and gray partitions, a flutter of elation and nerves rattled through my stomach at the freedom of being suddenly alone. I took my seat and peered out the window, watching familiarity drop out from under my feet, watching clouds replace tarmac and apprehension. I was on my way somewhere, finally on my way.

There is something beautiful about independence, about having the autonomy to make mature decisions alone, to have your own life at last in your own two palms, trembling as they may be. I owe this revelation to travel; without it, I would not have amassed my treasured self-sufficiency and vastly widened perspective of the world around me.

When I travel, I am compelled to fall in love with the world again and again and again.

Perhaps this is where the transformation lies: in the newfound outlook of curiosity and admiration garnered through exposure to unfamiliar cultures and foreign terrain, where indifference becomes obsolete and a spirit of inquiry is rewarded with adventure.

In traveling, every experience is a story. Each is a building block upon a foundation of growing wisdom regarding the intricate and enigmatic world that engulfs us.

In the quiet mountaintop town of Delphi, Greece, I met an elderly man who owned a small jewelry shop. The economy in Greece is notably poor, and the shop was empty. Before I purchased a blue-beaded bracelet for an alarmingly small sum, the man spoke kindly to me about his family and his shop. He asked me about my trip, the adventures we had gone on, and how we were enjoying Greece. I felt suddenly sorry for the meager few euros I was placing on the table; why should a person of such warmth and kindness earn so little? As I turned to leave, the old man offered me a pocket-sized safety pin with an evil eye bead strung around the silver clasp, an important symbol in many cultures (particularly ancient Greece). “To keep you safe,” he told me as he helped attach it to the hem of my shirt. His face was tan from the searing Greek sunlight, and his brown eyes crinkled warmly at the corners when he smiled. I mirrored his expression and bid him goodbye, suddenly tearful as my friends and I shut the shop door behind us.

There is so much kindness in the world, and the purest kindness requires nothing in return.

Through traveling, we learn about humility. We are mere pinpricks on a four-dimensional timeline that extends behind us and ahead of us for eternity, our eyes falling upon crossroads between layers and layers of history.

We saw the elderly man again the following day, at a quiet beach forty minutes away from Delphi. He recognized us instantly, smiled that warm wrinkled smile, and told us he had swam there every day for almost all of his life. I felt as though we had made a very rare friend with a very rare old man.

I was in a foreign country, on a beach I’d never been to, conversing again with a Greek grandfather who instantly treated us American kids as he would his own.

I had made friends with more than just the old man; I had made friends with an intangible piece of the world. A door had opened.

In a moment of clarity, I understood that if more people boarded more airplanes to more countries, spoke more warmly to more strangers, perhaps the world would be a kinder place. Maybe it would be less heartbreakingly sad, and a bit more heartbreakingly beautiful.