Episode 2: Why you can only understand the meaning of home after you've left it
The yearning to leave home is really a simmering desire to grow beyond where we are right now. And like a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis, we are also evolving into a new version of ourselves. And because growth can be one of the most uncomfortable but also potentially amazing experiences, today we will be exploring what it means to leave home to embark on a new adventure—the challenges you face before and during the journey, as well as the discoveries that are potentially waiting for you.
Listen now:
In this episode of Super Soul Podcast, we will…
Explore what it means to leave home, or in other words, our comfort zones
Learn about letting go of the sense of control
Gain perspective by understanding the purpose of going on a journey
Redefine the things that are important in life
Discover a new path forwards
“The moment that you decide to surrender to the journey, is the exact moment that you get initiated into the secret Universe of adventure travellers.”
Full transcript below.
Through the humdrum of daily life, we all get to some point where we are itching for something new. There is a feeling of restless desire, a sense of fitful edginess, the inability to sit still and remain calm. It’s almost as if you know, you are fidgeting because there is a new space you are subconsciously eager to walk into. Without realising, you are outgrowing where you are right now. It often manifests as the desire to travel and visit new places, or in other words, it’s when you’ve been bitten by the travel bug.
The obvious travel fever aside, this feeling of restiveness almost expresses itself as a desire to try a new cafe in town or check out new songs on the music charts. It could also be a yearning to move to a new house, change jobs or start a new hobby. In essence it is a desire to try new experiences that broaden our horizons and gain new perspectives in life. When we have this feeling, it’s because somewhere deep down inside, we know, and I use the word “know”, maybe not consciously yet, that we have reached a point in our lives where we have learnt all that we want to experience. We have exhausted the lessons and opportunities that life has provided us and subconsciously seek new ones.
In other words, the yearning to leave home is really a simmering desire to grow beyond where we are right now. And like a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis, we are also evolving into a new version of ourselves. And because growth can be one of the most uncomfortable but also potentially amazing experiences, today we will be exploring what it means to leave home to embark on a new adventure—the challenges you face before and during the journey, as well as the discoveries that are potentially waiting for you.
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Mark Twain said and I quote and unquote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor and catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
As young as I could remember, I always had a restless desire to go outside my home. My parents often recall, with much undischarged frustration, how they had to drive me around in the car for an hour every night for years, before I would go to bed. It seemed I was an extremely fidgety baby with a horribly restive spirit who could never sleep easily. I would bawl my eyes out the whole evening, refusing to sleep, until I got into the car. But refusing to sleep makes it sound like I chose not to sleep. It wasn’t so much of a choice as it was a state of being. I had a restless spirit and was always dreaming of some adventure. In primary school I always wanted to escape to the playground or some other place I could discover. I would even secretly sneak into town without informing my parents. And when I was 15, I joined a school tour to Europe without informing them either until the last minute, forging their signature of approval.
Possibilities and discoveries really excite me; I lived alot in my imagination, often wondering what things were like in different settings, time and spaces. I imagined I was a superhero, a swashbuckling pirate, a wandering swordsman on a horse and all these other adventuresome stories I came up with in my head. Indiana Jones caught my childish fantasy, as did so many others. Whenever I saw an experience I hadn’t had yet, I intensely wondered what it would be like. And with this restless curiosity, I was led by my nose from one crazy experience in life to another, year in and year out, following nothing but my intuition and imagination. The winds of adventure always called to me and still does today.
Every now and then, during my wanderings, I would often have chats with people on this very topic, one of those intensely deep and intimate conversations I thoroughly enjoy. These meetings occur in the most natural of ways and often in the most random of settings. They could be in a cafe somewhere or at a train station or even at a campsite. After a period of time, I gradually began to notice a certain look within people and realised, aha! that’s a stirring restlessness in their eyes and immediately I know, I have found a kindred spirit iin them. Perhaps that’s what drew them to me and me to them, across the ends of the world sometimes, because time and space holds no barrier when two people are supposed to meet.
And often the topic of stepping out of comfort zones would appear in our chats. Because single female travellers are quite unusual, not to mention the fact that I am also petite in size, the topic of my solo, and often my “no plan” travelling comes up. I soon learned from talking to people that the hardest thing for them about leaving home, is taking that very first step which often begins with even considering the possibility of change. I suppose for most, even the thought itself can be an overwhelming thing, for example, quitting one’s job is not something to be taken lightly. Also if one has a family and children, there is alot more to consider but for many of us without familial responsibilities, it becomes a topic of choice—do we make the choice to change our lives?
For those who are science buffs, Isaac Newton's first law states that every object will remain at rest or in uniform motion unless compel resist is real. Without a strong motivation, perhaps in the form of a life changing event, it can be really hard to shift the direction of our life, even if we have the desire to. An illness perhaps, a divorce, the death of someone close or being fired from a job and so on are common life changing events. Maybe it could even be inspiration from a movie or from someone in your circle of friends doing the same thing. But more often than not, what really pushes us to change, is because our current situation has become more stifling and suffocating, as compared to the fear and uncertainty of the change.
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Therefore, underneath the desire to leave home and travel, lies the deeper topic about comfort zones—do we have the desire, strength and courage to take the leap and make the change?
The decision is first and foremost something that has to be driven from deep within us, thought about, decided and owned by us. It isn’t something that one can follow others or it wouldn’t be called taking a leap. And so, we can’t rely on our circle of friends for advice, encouragement or guidance. Nor is it something we can really plan for. How do we plan an experience which we have never had before? More importantly, it’s almost like the more one tries to plan, the less likely one leaps! Like analysis paralysis.
Almost a decade ago now, I remember the very first time I felt this way was when I took a 6 month trip to Japan in an attempt to manage my exhaustion and near burn out from running my businesses. Being an entrepreneur was something my younger self really enjoyed but 10 years in and the high energy lifestyle took a toll on me. My partner wordlessly bought me a one-way ticket and encouraged me to let go of everything for a few months so I could rejuvenate and come back stronger.
Despite how much I trusted him, it was sooo difficult for me to let go of my life and of my bsiness. I literally sat in my apartment in downtown Shinjuku for 5 days, feeling so frazzled, stressed, overwhelmed and was constantly in tears, for what I had no idea. My mind kept going back to work and worrying about this and that. The slightest thing would set me off in stress when it ordinarily wouldn’t. At one point, I had to move apartments due to some issue and I broke down from overwhelm. I was even surprised at my own response. Thank God my dear friend’s husband was on leave that day and came over to help with the move.
At the start, I had planned to go camping for a month or two, just to get away from it all, to unwind and soak myself in the countryside. While hiding away in my Airbnb apartment, and in an attempt to get my arse moving, I asked my partner to pick a campsite for me within certain parameters—about 4 hr drive away from Tokyo, in a clean campsite with hot springs. I really wanted to try the hotsprings. Ever encouraging of my antics, he chose one and I wordlessly plugged it into my GPS and set off one day, without knowing where I was heading. This was the start of a whole crazy, incredible, life changing adventure and discovery for me, which you can read about in my book.
Looking at it now 10 years later, perhaps the greatest recurring challenge that I had to face on thse trips, is the coming face to face with the mechanism of control. For me it was about letting go of the responsibility of running a business, the profits and sales, the paying of the staff and so on. But I think for most people, letting go of whatever you were carrying before, or thought you had to carry, and going with the flow, can be really confronting. Of course it’s different things for different people but underlying it all is the sense of control.
Many of us reach for this sense of control to manage our anxiety in different ways, for example booking accomodation weeks or months in advance. Or even planning a back-to-back itinerary and so on. Perhaps we have tourist things we want to tick off our list. Definitely, travelling without a plan is a different way than most people are used to, but I think the really amazing experiences, the sort of out of the world experiences, happen when we let go of our expectations and sense of control of needing things to be a certain way. And of course this refers to even the planning of the itinerary.
It’s like as long as we are holding onto a certain way of experiencing, then new ways can’t really appear. When you are on a journey and you surrender to it, a beautiful world of experiences opens up. It feels alittle like you are on a boat and you are letting the river guide you down, enjoying the ride, watching the animals at the bank drinking, feeling the breeze and the splash of water. You don’t know which river bank you will end up stopping at, but that’s half the fun—letting the river decide your destination. Because you don’t know what surprises await you.
This is a really scary thing but the very moment you decide to surrender that sense of control, is the exact moment that you get initiated into the secret Universe of adventure travellers. It’s like that Harry Potter 1 ¾ wall, you know when the muggles have to jump into a brick wall in faith, before they could enter the magic world. It’s abit like this feeling. And so if there’s only one thing that you get out of today’s podcast, it has to be this one and I’m going to repeat it—that the very moment you decide to surrender, is the exact moment that you get initiated into the secret Universe of adventure travellers. I can’t repeat it enough.
Of course each person’s experience of this state of surrender is so different and unique that there is no one way that is right.
For this reason there is no predefined roadmap in life, in the sense of like, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. which brings me to the point of discoveries, your story itself becomes a roadmap for someone else going on the same unchartered journey as you. Our stories of adventure on this unbeaten path in life— that doesn’t necessarily follow society’s prescribed plan of living—lay the path for many others after us who are seeking as such and help them travel to a new destination in life.
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So I think every journey that someone embarks on is so important to the broader world that we live in because each experience is like a spark that further sparks new experiences in someone else and somone else and someone else. Truly, every trip I’ve gone on gave me something very special; a gift or memento, whether in the form of an actual souvenir, or more often a discovery about life, an intimate connection with someone or simply just beautiful memories that carry me on my journey. It didn’t take me long to realise that these were priceless treasures were worth more than all the money I was making as an entrepreneur.
I wrote a piece in my blog titled, “Collecting lovers around the world”, and in it I talk about what it means to live in an open-hearted, vulnerable way, falling in love with life itself; recognising that love is a choice we make every day. These discoveries aren’t so much about the world as it is about ourselves—for the world really begins and ends with us. We contain the spark of life itself and have the power to create and choose our destiny, our path. We have simply forgotten it. When we go on our journeys, we put ourselves in situations that require us to confront all these hidden parts of ourselves. The act of doing so gradually peels away the layers and awakens us to who we truly are inside—a beautiful spark of the Universe.
But more importantly, these journeys are so temporary and present in the moment that no matter how much you want to grab on to them, to the feelings, the moments, even the endings, you find that you can’t, and so it really homes in on the fact that we cannot grasp the moment and need to let go in order to truly enjoy each experience as it comes.
There’s really no other way to discover this other than to surrender to life itself. Of course no amount of talking about it is going to give you that spark of awareness as experiencing it yourself will do, so I will leave you here with the three things I will tell my younger self:
Stop overthinking and just leap. As long as you have prepared sufficiently, trust in yourself to take the jump.
Focus on the discoveries not the fear. Whenever things become overwhelming, as they will be, as they are a part of the journey, know that you are in the midst of a new discovery. Let that guide you.
And lastly, don’t forget to enjoy the ride—both the good and the bad ones.
Thank you for being here with me today. I’m so glad you are. Stay curious and hydrated on your journey.