“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”

-Cesare Pavese.

Traveling — really traveling — is daunting. It should scare you just enough to leave your fingers trembling against your plane ticket, just enough to leave you entirely unaware of what lies ahead, just enough to make your heart beat faster and your hugs last longer. It is not all luxury hotels and five-star restaurants and guided tours.

Real travel is self discovery.

Real travel is a tangled amalgamation of escape and arrival, the latter something you find in yourself along the way.

Real travel is an ever-changing definition of home.

Real travel is familiar smiles on foreign faces, and welcome compassion when the novelty of where you are makes you afraid.

Real travel is love, and in the words of my favorite movie: love is, actually, all around. (Can you guess the movie?)

We are not limited in the number of people we are allowed to love. Our hearts do not hit maximum capacity at 10 or 20 or 100 or 1,000. Imagine the love we could let enter our lives if we lifted the quota, smiled more kindly and openly at strangers, thus potentially finding those strangers to be not quite so strange anymore.

In a previous post I mentioned an old gentleman my friends and I had the blessing of meeting in Delphi, Greece. His eyes contained the depth of his country, old and beautiful and broken, and in his smile, there was a universe of love. Had we not taken the time out of our days, out of our lives, out of our rationed reserves of love, we would perhaps not have welcomed the ingress of such a benevolent presence, even if it was for only a moment or two.

When we ventured to Italy, there was the illustrious Massimo, National Geographic photographer and artist extraordinaire. He was as pure-bred Italian as they come, and as wise and transcendent as a monk. He showed us Rome, Salerno, Capri… he sent us on adventures to meet the men behind pizza ovens and the waiters behind bars and the tourists from Amsterdam on their way next to who-knows-where. We listened to countless stories, sat on benches and watched a hundred lives rush by around us in a milieu unlike our own, and yet quite possibly just the same.

All of these people, all of these lives, all of these stories…where is the common link? How can we possibly share anything but this current space on earth? What ties could possibly hold us together, peel back our layers of polar difference and reveal our most innate human qualities?

Love.

All 7.4 billion people on this planet inherently seek it.

If you smile at someone in any country, you are showing a universal symbol of love, compassion, kindness, warmth… and it is welcome. Everywhere.

There are 742.5 million human beings on the continent of Europe. There are 4.43 billion on the continent of Asia. 31.26 million in Australia. 1.1 billion in Africa. Need I go on to prove my point that the possibilities of meeting new people (and thus the possibility of expanding your capacity to love until it maxes out at infinity) are bountiful? That you can find a like soul somewhere out there, maybe thousands of miles from where you are comfortable and snug in your familiar bed, and you can speak a common language of smiles and high fives and hugs, and you can love.

It all starts with trembling fingers and a plane ticket.