Being alone is something people can only learn to appreciate with ages.
When you are a baby, there is no doubt that you must be with someone, because you cannot even eat, pee, or anything by yourself. As a child, you need to learn different things and play with the others. Being a teenager, you might want be alone from your parents, but never with your friends. Gradually, you don't want spend all the time with your family, friends, relationships. Because so much of our daily life is about accommodating others, which is how it is should be in social situations. Traveling alone give a perfect chance to to step back from the status as a wife, coworker, friend, __ and just be yourself as whoever you want.
I love traveling alone, and just be Ivy who sometimes skips talking for the whole day, and sometimes likes wearing things that don't exactly match, and sometimes wants to do street viewing for quite a long time because its kind of interesting.
My best travel experiences have always been while traveling alone: invited to a Tibetan home for an overnight staying for a shooting star night, invited to road trip by a tractor, invited to a sailing race at a fantastic day. Yes, I have definitely had challenging and risks. All these difficulties help me feel independent and be more self-affirming.
Traveling alone also gives me a chance to meet myself. Of course, I could also meet people. But first, myself. I experience the world's delights with the perfect use of my own nostrils, tongue and touch. I believe that traveling alone is the last great test of who you are in a world where everyone aches to be the same.
The fun starts with the choices, which actually I hate it the most. But it is always easier alone than more. Will I be cycling through the mountain in New Zealand? Riding horse in Tibet? Staying in the boat overnight at the boat from Stockholm to Helsinki? Doing yoga in front of a perfect blue sea in Bali?
And then you will enjoy the most of independence. "From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets, at last -- for the first time -- I live!" wrote by Henry James. Yes, I opened the window onto the Grand Canal and felt the breeze; ordered room service and pressed my face against a cotton pillow; took out the books during the break of mountain cycling; took off my shoes and died of bliss. I experienced what I want to enjoy without any distraction. My time is entirely my own.
Traveling alone is a great way to re-center, to escape from the details of daily life that can distract us from our own big picture and to come back with a new sense of self-sufficiency and purpose.
Surely I also had really great experience to travel with people, or visit friend's city. And as you know, I am such a lazy ass. If somebody arranged things for me, I didn't do any check for basic information, fully trusting of the others. So I urged myself finally make my solo trip to Hallstatt for this year, still combined with the visiting to Vienna to see my dear friend.
And then it's the moment of: I am here, right now, and I am on the way.
