You are a career-oriented college student. You have an idea of what you want to do after senior year, and it seems pretty difficult. Additionally, job prospects are slim. You have a big world map in your room with little pins marking places you want to live, and the longer you stare, the more you realize you’ll never have the time to properly live in all these places. You decide to take a full year to do whatever you want. Senior week comes, you graduate and off you go.
You’re going to need money. Hopefully, you worked the past few summers, or during the school year. You don’t need to pay off substantial loans, nor have family responsibilities or visa restrictions, and so on. If you’ve made it this far, what a privilege. You decide to take a difficult seasonal job to make enough to fund your travels. When the money is gone, the trip is over.
You’re going to need a goal. Lying on a beach somewhere might be fun for about a week, but you’ll get restless soon.
You start with where you’re from. Maybe you’re a Brazilian American, and your parents haven’t taken you around the country beyond the village where they grew up. Or maybe you’re Korean American and have never visited the country. You’ve always wondered: How do the people who look like you live? It doesn’t make much sense to fly straight to Bali, then, if you have somewhere more important to be. Go there first.
You arrive at your destination. Hostelling is strange at first, meeting new people who don’t care much about your old life. But once you let go, you can see it for what it is: a fast-moving community. You consider hitchhiking. It’s fun but tricky. Gas stations are the easiest place to find stopped cars, but there might not be many there, so toll stations are the next best option. You get your first ride, and the thrill is insane. The driver is extremely kind. Spending $10 to $20 a day feels amazing. You practice your language skills. As you share meals and homes across the country, you realize you’ve never done something similar for a stranger before. You want to be kinder.
Down the road, as you travel through extreme poverty, you find yourself paying for medical treatments and clothing. The nights alone in hotel rooms are refreshing after hours of conversation with your driver. But hitchhiking is hard, and after a while, you stop.
You find another goal. What have you not done since you were young? What hobby would you pick up if you were to retire today? You might be a guitarist who’s always liked desert blues or a baseball player who wants to try judo. The urge to summit mountains has always lingered in the back of your mind. This is your year to do that. Although there are plenty of places in America to learn, it often comes with forms, schooling and expensive classes. Elsewhere in the world, skills are shared more simply. Combined with the novelty of being a foreigner, you can get pretty far. Just ask. You’re on vacation, yes, but you still need something to wake up for in the morning.
Next, you need something to keep your mind occupied: You’re a career-oriented student, after all. One of the most important things you can do is learn a language. You spend an hour a day learning the language of the country you visit most. Using a phone app — with the premium version — and a notebook, progress is fast. Learning a language shows respect, and you are, after all, becoming a kinder person. Some locals don’t speak English, and others speak it so often that it becomes tiring. You all pick up trash, argue in traffic and sell fruit. All men are brothers, and language is love.
As you travel, the time spent alone starts to wear on you. The constant cycle of meeting new people and saying goodbye becomes easier, but should it? You stop caring about the newest waterfall or temple. Even your hobby begins to lose meaning. You wish you were back, working. A full year to do whatever you want — and yet, with no one to wake you up in the morning and no one waiting for you to come home, is it freedom or loneliness?
Yet, that feeling fades as well. Local kids with few job prospects play on the beach, and you share in their frustration. An older foreigner living in a beach town sells you their surfboard, too sick to surf himself. You call friends, and they tell you they wish they were living like you. From hitchhiking to desert blues to judo, the environment makes new things possible, and your goals slowly shift. Slow changes become more manageable. You meet friends from your travels again. There are so many people like you, some completely opposed to returning home. A few people don’t have a home to return to, and others don’t know what they want at all. No one has figured it out — except maybe you. Or do you? Your travels slow down. Then they pick up again, and slow even further. Reading on your porch, listening to music in traffic. Patience.
You book a plane ticket home when the year is up. Bits of your year fill your bag — a marker from your first day hitchhiking, a photobooth picture with friends, fishing equipment, inedible hotel candies, receipts. You know you’ll be restless once you get back, so you have a job — maybe even graduate school — lined up. A part of you wants to forget this entire year spent doing nothing, with habits so against what you’ve always known. Yet, now you’ve seen what that mindset can have on people. The lost travelers, tired older men and corporate burnouts tell the same story as anyone on the street: all there is to see is right here. Years down the road, as a career-minded college student, you may be just like them. But it’s not your time yet. You’re too restless to sit still. Back into the world you go. This life was fun, but it’s time for someone else to live it.
