There is a certain amount of introspection that I like to have before going on a major trip. This reflection often happens in airports or buses, on trains or in the first moments of arrival.
I reflect on what I often call, the calm before the storm, or more aptly, the quiet before the madness.
The disarray and chaos that can sometimes come with international travel, lends itself to periods of reflection. I use the following travel quotes to reflect on the moments before, leading up to and after a travel trip.
“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley