How has travel affected your life?

It is hard to overstate the effect travel has had on my life and on my outlook and vision of reality.  As a young man, I was filled with wanderlust.  I attended college for a little while, then dropped out and decided to approach life from a different perspective.  Since I was not welcome in my family home, nor really in my home town, I moved away.  Why I wasn't accepted in the childhood world of fantasy is another long and unrelated story, suffice it to say my teenage rebellion was extreme and damaging to many people in my life.

I found that I had an affinity with the Bay Area and the streets of the large West coast urban jungles.  With my huge mohawk and teenage indestructibility, I bravely moved into the early 1980's Hardcore Punk Rock world of the West Coast.  This was my first real experience with true traveling.  It was not traveling in the sense of going to a new physical destination, rather it was traveling out of my comfort zone so completely that I lost my way back to that tiny area of my childhood and antiquated moral climate.

Traveling into the Hardcore Universe changed the very nature of my vision of the world around me, both social and physical.  I was no longer blindered by the social walls we have all created through simply living an unawarer life.  Punk Rock forced me to come to terms with most of my darkest and most damaging impulses, redesign my entire ethical and moral system, and question nearly everything I had ever been taught.

After a time I started a small business that was quite lucrative.  I would work for six to eight months of the year and then stick a tack in the globe and head out.  I traveled without a lot of money, with a single carryon backpack, and my passport.  My mohawk was enough to insure that I was always taken care of and fed.  The Hardcore World is a close knit international tribe that can spot a fellow travelor anywhere.  It is not the look or the clothes, rather the attitude and bearing.  DIY (Do It Yourself) is the central tenet of Hardcore, and we live in that moment all the time.

Africa, Europe, Turkey, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Israel, USSR, Russia, India: and the list goes on.  These are the places I have journeyed on my long road to self awareness.  Each place changed my, always for the better.  Opening the mind to a smallness of the world and the similarity between people, this is what travel has done for me.  Cultural and Sociial differences pale in comparison to our simple humanity.

When I finally settled down a little, enforced due to a period of incarceration, I was finally able to realize that even though I had learned a lot on my ramblings and rovings I had still been running away from the most priaml and fundamental journey in human life, a journey that few embark upon and fewer actually significantly undertake: the journey within to that place that makes a person human.  For the twelve years that I spent sitting alone in a small prison cell, I actively undertook that journey asking every question that I was able to construct, examining every aspect of my life, as well as human life, through as objective a lens as I could discover, losing the ability to see the 'I' as separate from the 'we', coming to grips with all that is and all that is not (the latter half being as important as the first half).

This is the journey of ages and it affects me every moment of every day, as I travel through the essential truth of experience to uncover the deeper truths of primal being.  It is the lens through which I live my entire life.  I could not, however, have begun the journey within without having experience the travels of the journey without.