“The soul survives its adventures” and other life lessons travel teaches

G.K. Chesterton wrote the following quote: “Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”

I like this rumination on middle age, and was inspired when I read it an article in The New York Times by Patricia Cohen: “Get a Midlife.”

Only problem? Though I feel that lesson in my bones, at the ripe old age of early-thirties, I’m not chronologically there yet by the writers’ standards.

So, I wonder if travelers arrive at this revelation early; not because we have such unusual adventures around the world, but because of the incredible abundance of that “there will be another trip” sense that comes with travel. Think of a youth for whom going home from camp or spring break is the end of the world — that’s the most basic example of this mechanism at work. That youth has not yet learned that his or her soul will continue to grow. That youth has not yet learned to travel.

Everyone always talks about how travel refreshes your perception of your life at home, but I think travel also teaches you rules of traveling through life. It is perhaps in this way that it heals broken hearts and fortifies personalities. Just a handful of other lessons one can learn from traveling include:

• You can’t see everything in one visit.
• Enjoy things while they are in front of you because they won’t always be.
• You can survive and flourish anywhere you want to.
• “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet

Travel demonstrates the G.K. Chesterton quote “The soul survives its adventures” quite beautifully. Regular travel shows you, repetitively, like good practice, that there is no end of the world when something is over. No matter how much your heart aches from loneliness or homesickness or loss, or how much it fills to bursting with beauty and love for a new place, you don’t die from it. And, miraculously, you can feel it even more strongly in another place, in another time, with new people you never imagined you’d meet.

Maybe it’s because I’m moving 1,000 miles across the country to my hometown of Minneapolis tomorrow that I’m pondering this resilience I know that I’ve learned. It trickles down to everything; like not freaking out when your car gets towed, or not crying when you drop your phone off the side of a boat, or not losing hope when you’ve been lost for two hours and you can’t remember where your hotel key is anyway. You learn that things can be worked out, and that everything will always, always be okay — that everything always is okay.