How ‘Light and Cheap’ Travel Helped me Escape Death
In my darkest hours, during which I was choosing between living and dying, I found the perfect method to help me make such a decision — travel.
I had no hope and nothing to lose, so I decided to go on for just one more year. Apparently, relocating myself from the place where I was constantly reminded of mu misery was an obvious choice. But where to?
I decided to go on a road trip.
It’s the combination of being poor and being destination-less, I decided to go ‘light and cheap’ backpack at places I wanted to see before my death. By ‘light and cheap,’ I meant traveling with 7 kgs or less and staying at places that were as cheap as possible, including free public spaces if permitted.
Little did I know that it would change my worldview completely. This post is about how that happened.
- Travel made me live in the present moment.
As neuroscience tells us, the primordial part of our brain constantly brings us back to the moments of doubt, reminding us of risks and mistakes to help us navigate life. As for me, my cautious brain tried to get me to make sense of what, at the time, unmakesensable, which only furthered my sense of grieves.
Travelling light and cheap with a single backpack, I had to be conscious of my own safety and appreciative of every little thing being experienced. Although I heard of people’s talking about the “power of living in the moment,” I could not practice it until I was in that very ‘humble state’ that travel put me in.
Via light and cheap travel, I found that switch in my brain that put me in the state of being present where the past could not overpower the presence and the future did not matter anymore. I felt the presence of joy even though when I was living on the street with homeless folks with whom I made friends.
2. Walking around is a perfect activity for listening to nature (and audiobooks)
I was never an auditorial person.
In fact, I found noise to be the arch-enemy of focusing. Because I was travelling light and cheap, I moved mostly on foot, which allowed me to develop my sensitivity for sound. Strangely, I could hear things that I could not before, such as a flowing river, birdsong, and the sound of the wind. I discovered that these sound made me feel as though I wasn’t alone, which was the feeling that I dreaded and almost drove me to my death. Suddenly, the sound of busy neighbourhoods that I once disdained gave me the sense of peace and comfort of being surrounded by people.
I walked around the city just to appreciate these sounds. I even found the ambience sound of traffic to be quite present. I began to record these sounds and re-played them to help me sleep. Enjoying things I could hear when my eyes closed and my body’s not moving, I began to appreciate Autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR, which I could not sleep without now.
Also, I learned to appreciate the beauty of audiobooks, which was a perfect companion when walking around. I finished more than 100+ audiobooks in 2 years of travelling and more than 1,000 hours of podcasts.
3. Travel connected me with likeminded strangers who told me that I was — and would never be — alone.
Travelling light and cheap was, also, a perfect way of meeting strangers. I used low-budget travels such as third-class trains and buses to travel. Whether that be a short 1-hour or an 18-hour ride, I always chose buses and trains over low-cost aeroplanes because travelling long-distance made me appreciate the destinations more.
But the true bonus was how I got to meet so many people with whom I shared meals, drinks, stories, and laughter. Because we’re travelling light and cheap, we connected easily and made friends sincerely.
Before we knew it, usually, we would be conversing and chatting about the reasons for travelling. I learned, through these strangers, that a lot of hardships were about the perspectives. Little by little, I found peace with my own life. It’s rough but that’s because I was only capable of seeing it my way.
4. Travel helped me regain my health.
Before I began the journey, I was obese, unnaturally bald, and physically unhealthy. I didn’t realize that it was because I overate due to stress, lacked exercising due to busy work, and constantly sick due to polluted city environment. Getting out of what I thought was “what I wanted,” I allowed myself to live a different life.
When travelling, I only had a meal a day (well, because that’s all I could afford), and, almost by default, I had to walk more than 10 miles a day to save on transit. So, I became conscious of what to eat. I needed a lot of nutrition and good calories to get me through the day and the 10-mile-long walk, meaning no more junk food, sugar, and empty calories through snacking. The healthy eating and walking turned my life around, as I begun to lose weight, gained bodily muscle, and became a healthier person.
So, I did not think that I could turn my life around, but those 2 years of being on the road was nothing less than a revelation that I needed to experience life differently. I found later on that as psychology tells us that the best way to overcome an emotional crisis is to remove ourselves from the physical that makes us sick. The idea of travel only makes such as removing more interesting, and, in turn, complete the ecosystem of overcoming a difficult situation.
As the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once advised we should find an opportunity to travel, as the new experiences in unfamiliar places are the kinds of “productive uncertainty” that enables to grow.
