You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.
Elizabeth GilbertRead
to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
Interpretation
Traveling enriches our lives and is worth any personal investment.
This quote by Elizabeth Gilbert emphasizes the profound value of travel as an experience that transcends material costs and sacrifices. It suggests that the benefits gained through exploring new places, cultures, and ideas far outweigh the financial or personal sacrifices one may encounter in the pursuit of such enriching experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the benefits of travel in personal growth.
You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.
Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?
And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.
But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.
It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.
Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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