On my mind…

So have you ever thought about traveling? And if you have traveled, did you make the most of it? Taking this a step further, have you ever thought about living abroad? I am sure at some stage you have. 

Once again let’s look at it in a real life situation. You sit with your buddies having a drink or maybe a braai. You indicate that you are interested in going aboard – I mean at the time you don’t really know why, you are just running it by them to see what they think. So you go with a reason of there aren’t really that many opportunities locally. The response is negative! Now I am one of those people that pay attention to others and I am also interested in what they have to say, although sometimes I think too much. Anyway to sum up you hear things like: “What are you doing to do when you get back?”; “You will have to start off from the beginning when you get back”.

Now I don’t know about you but is that really a good enough reason. I read a book a while ago and something that really stuck with me is the idea of “Learning, earning, yearning”. This author (I can’t remember his name, and google doesn’t help) subscribes to the idea that your life consists of 3 main stages namely: learning (school and tertiary education), earning (working) and lastly yearning (I will get to this later). He also states that the idea of life is to minimizing the yearning in the yearning stage. Meaning you shouldn’t regret things like decisions or actions. Basically you shouldn’t yearn for anything or at least keep that down to the absolute minimum. Now with this in mind how many people have you heard yearning? How many people have you heard say that they should have traveled the world. I mean unbeknownst to them they still can it is just not that easy.

So really what I am trying to say is that I don’t really want to be one of those people that yearn for something. I want to be wise, experience other cultures and see things that I read about. Is that not a good reason to go a board? Is “What are you doing to do when you get back?” really a good enough reason not to go? I think sometimes people think too much about the consequences. What do you think?