Yesterday on the way back home, a friend who I met on the bus asked me a question "why do you like traveling? does it make you a better person?". I joked back "I am already the best, why do I need to be better". But deep in my heart, I questioned myself "am I a better person because of traveling". It is really hard to answer but I do share some experiences and hope I answer this question by the stories.
Undoubtedly, traveling makes people open minded. However, an open-minded person is not equal to a better person. People could be open-minded without traveling and people could be still close-minded with traveling experiences. IN GENERAL, people loving traveling are more open minded than domestic people.
Some people claim that they love traveling, but I don't believe what they say. If they just go to a different places, always stay in the hotels, continually lie on the beach, and only talk to the other tourists, we can call it as a holiday but not traveling. Traveling can be short or long, which does not matter of the length of period. But traveling people will interact with real locals, enjoy native food and explore surroundings by themselves. People always showed me hundreds of pictures of where they have been, and they talked a lot what they have seen. Is it traveling only about the places? I would highly recommend a book wrote by Alain De Botten "the art of travel". Actually in the book, he didn't encourage people to go travel as much as they can, at the end, travel is just a way of life.
I love traveling alone, which is not just because of freedom and convenience, also the reason to mediate. I totally agree that people can mediate anytime. But what we think is always constrained by your surroundings and people around you. When you are traveling, you are jumping out from your normal life, we don't need to adapt ourselves to the others. Behaviors change, so does mediation.
I guess I told several friends the story happened to me when I was in Tibet. I do like sharing here. I always said that one day I would like to write it down. Finally I get the chance.
The first few days when I was in Tibet, I wasn't happy about what I have seen. Before I went there, I had really high expectations. In my mind, Tibet should be the place sacred and purified.When I arrived Lhasa, I was already disappointed on the way from train station to my hotel. I saw a big market of electronic stuffs, mostly cellphones and mp3/4s, which you could find the same market all over the second or third line cities. Lhasa is occupied by tourism and everything there is commercial. I felt so sad. I started to doubt the reason I went there after the first day I walked around. I didn't have any plan at that moment and return ticket. I decided to give myself few more days to see how it was going on. The next several days I went to Jokhang temple, which is the most sacred and important temple for most Tibetans. Everyday there are thousands of people visiting and praying there, and hundreds of buddhist praying at Jokhang square. I spend three days sitting in front of the gate, listening all those praying in Tibetan which I didn't understand, and melting under the plateau sun. I was hoping I could change my mind and start to explore the whole Tibet. But my incentive was gone day by day. I even listened two totally different versions of the story of pillar in front of the temple. Tourists didn't care, and they just would happy to tell the others that they had been to Tibet and Jokhang temple.
Things always happened without a clue.
I was still sitting in front of the temple and planning that I might go back to my hometown instead of staying. An old Tibetan woman sit besides me. Her elbow protection was broken, and she tried to fix it. If you don't know anything about Tibetan prostrations, here I could tell you something.
A prostration is a gesture used in Buddihist practice to show reverence to the three jewels. In Tibetan tradition, people generally do full prostration, which is described like "place your hands together and touch your crown, throat and heart, then stretch your entire body on the ground and stretch both of your hands as far as possible away from you head, then rise up quickly and repeat". So when they do large number like 100000, people need to wear protections for the knees and elbows.
The woman tried to put a type of plastic wire into a needle, which was really difficult with her old age and poor quality of split wire. (TBC)
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