Travel whenever you get the chance
Take every opportunity to broaden your perspective…
Updated: 2022-01-17
Seeing new sights and hearing new sounds is what we spend the first two decades of our life doing. It’s critical to help shape our brain. What sounds and shapes do you need to recognize? Your brain carves out some space for those and the rest of your thinking is built off of what it carves.
So, naturally, travelling around the world becomes a powerful way to study the most drastically different set of sounds and shapes you can.
What that gives you is a powerful dictionary that forms the foundation of your thoughts, your sentences, your ideas, and even your feelings. Those foundations then help you communicate with someone else, who has a different dictionary than you but, hopefully, there’s some overlap in the dictionary items. Communication, at that point, becomes how ideas evolve in right-angles, bounce off each other, and spring back to hit you in the face with what should have been obvious from the beginning.
So, those are those thoughts then…
I’m here in Marseille as a part of my mini-post-doc but, in many ways, it’s really an opportunity to finish our the thoughts I had going into my PhD. I just need the words to form the sentences and, in many ways, my travels on this side of the Atlantic have given me those words.
Communicating through this blog, my newly active twitter account, and various other forms of writing, have given me my voice back. For the first time in a decade or so I feel like what I’m writing is congruent with what I’m wanting to say, with special emphasis on the I in that sentence.
Update from 2022
Wow, I’m very glad I traveled so much in 2018, when I had the chance…