Travel. It’s about being on the move.

When we were young, maybe we were forced to travel, travel for a better life and a better education. Growing up, I moved quite a bit: Melbourne to Malaysia to Singapore and back to Melbourne. My parents wanted to work in Asia, and so little me was dragged along with them.

As we grow older and get stuck into making a living, travel becomes a choice. A choice that we dream of. A choice that we work and save up for.

We travel for holidays. Travel to have fun. To relax. Unwind. For most of the year, we feel exhausted from either school or work. Going on a road trip, cruise, hike or sightseeing in a different town or part of the world may be what we need to recharge.

Amidst school and work, we have problems and frustrations left, right and centre. Relationship dramas. Boring work. Itchy feet. So we travel to get away. To runaway. To escape. To forget. There’s only so much my eyes can take staring at the computer all day punching in data, five straight days a week to meet deadlines.

We travel not just to see the world, but to explore and get lost. We travel to experience other places and cultures, to open our eyes to another world out there. We’re all social creatures in some sense and it’s always fun getting to know someone, no matter how awkward it may be.

Some of us travel for work, jetting back and forth cities for meetings and conferences, seeing the sights on our lunch breaks. Lucky. For many of us, traveling the world comes around maybe once, twice, perhaps thrice a year. That’s if we have the time and money to do so, and if we’re able to decide where to go.

With each choice that we make, we learn. We learn more about ourselves, the people around us, and who and what matters to us the most. So we travel emotionally. We travel through the challenges life throws at us, through the happy and hard times; we travel to grow. Every day.

When I returned to Melbourne, I was ashamed of being Asian Australian. Always teased for my Singapore-Malaysian accent and unable to speak Chinese at school, I felt like an extra and didn’t belong anywhere: too white to be Asian and too Asian to be Australian. One day I woke up and realised I wasn’t going to be happy if I lived hating myself day and night.

And so we travel to slow down, to actually think and listen to ourselves. We travel to find ourselves, to turn our lives around and soar.

When we travel, we go places. We journey to discover the world and the person within us.

We travel because we want to.

And we travel, when we least expect it.

Why do you travel? Do you like traveling?