Life in Transit Mode

I’ve lost count of the number of flights I’ve taken in the last decade. Window seat or aisle? I barely flinch anymore. Airports don’t overwhelm me, nor do unfamiliar cities. But this time, on the third evening of a rather ordinary week in an unremarkable hotel room in Vilnius, something shifted. I didn’t write about the cobbled streets or the amber shops. I stared at the blank page and realised — this one wasn’t going to be about the place. This one had to be about the act of travelling itself. About why I do what I do. About why one should too.

Travelling is not just geography. It’s philosophy. It’s the art of movement — physical, emotional, mental. When people ask why I keep moving, I wish I could show them a montage of moments. Like that time in Bosnia, when an old café owner insisted I sit for rakija at 10 in the morning because “there is no wrong time for good company.” Or the night in Varanasi when a rickshaw puller recited Kabir’s poetry to me in fluent Bhojpuri under a flickering street lamp. These were not checklist moments for Instagram. They were gifts. Unscheduled, human, profound. We live in curated bubbles — same people, same opinions, same cafés, same headlines. Travel, when done right, bursts that bubble. In Guatemala, I once got stranded in a village where no one spoke English, and my Spanish was elementary at best. A teenage boy noticed my panic, ran to fetch his older sister, and together they helped me find a ride to the next town. We didn’t exchange Instagram handles or take selfies. We smiled, nodded, and moved on. But I carry them with me still. I remember an old woman I met on a train to Hiroshima. She was tiny, wore a knitted cap, and offered me oranges wrapped in a napkin. She told me — through a translator sitting across — that her husband died in the bombing. But she still believed people were good. “Keep going,” she said, touching my hand. “Tell the stories.” That’s what I’ve tried to do. Not just see cities, but collect voices. The Ghanaian musician on the ferry to Cape Coast who sang Bob Marley to calm a crying child. The truck driver in Ladakh who cooked me Maggi in a dented aluminium pot as we waited for a landslide to clear. The Tunisian bookseller who refused to let me pay because “you are far from home, and I am not.” How do you repay kindness like that? You pass it on. You travel more. You listen better.

It’s not always romantic, though. There are missed flights, stolen wallets, shady hostels, and food poisoning that humbles you to your core. But even those become stories, reminders that the world is not designed for our comfort. It’s designed for our growth. And growth only happens when you leave what you know. I’ve come to believe that the journey is the only real teacher. Travel doesn’t just show you the world. It shows you you. Who you are when no one’s watching. Who you are when you can’t read the menu or navigate the metro. When you’re lost, tired, and hungry. That’s when you meet your real self — raw, vulnerable, alive. People ask if I ever get tired of it — the suitcases, the visas, the goodbyes. Sometimes I do. But the exhaustion is temporary. What lingers is the magic of connection. Like the Moroccan grandmother who insisted I try her harira soup. Or the 10-year-old in Himachal who asked if the sea really exists because he’d never seen one. I showed him a video on my phone. His eyes lit up like I’d shown him a galaxy. If you’re reading this and haven’t travelled in a while — I don’t mean a luxury holiday or a business trip — I mean travelled, the kind where you walk, eat, speak, listen and observe like a child — then maybe it’s time. Not for a destination, but for a disruption. Step out. Let the world surprise you.

I don’t know where I’m headed next. I rarely do anymore. But I know why I go. I go for the stories. For the stillness that follows the chaos. For the stranger who waves. For the child who asks questions. For the silence that teaches more than words ever could. Travel not because you’re lost. But because you want to find. And sometimes, just sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you remember who you were before the world told you who to be.