I have spent much of my life trying to understand why travel matters so much. On the surface, it looks faintly ridiculous. You leave a perfectly good house, pay money to sit in a metal tube beside someone who has misunderstood the purpose of armrests, arrive somewhere unfamiliar, fail to understand the signs, eat something you cannot confidently identify, walk too far, sleep badly, lose a receipt, and then return home claiming to be transformed.
And yet we are.
That is the strange magic of travel. It is inconvenient, expensive, tiring, occasionally confusing and almost always worth it. It does something few other experiences manage. It makes life bigger. It takes the small room of the self and knocks out a few walls. Suddenly the world contains more than our habits, opinions, routines, shopping lists, bills, weather complaints and the mysterious drawer full of cables no one dares throw away.
I do not travel because I want to escape life. I travel because I want to understand it better. Travel has given me memories that feel more permanent than possessions, and, at my age, that matters. Objects gather dust. Phones become obsolete. Clothes shrink in the wardrobe, which I maintain is their fault rather than mine. But a good journey remains alive. It sits quietly in the mind and waits to be revisited.
London is one of those places for me. I can never see London as just a city. It is too layered for that. It is a living argument between the past and the present, between empire and market stalls, theatres and tube stations, old pubs and glass buildings, ceremonial grandeur and someone eating crisps on the underground as though civilisation has already ended. London does not simply show you history. It makes you walk through it while checking whether your Oyster card still works. I love that about it.
London taught me that memory is not always made by spectacular events. Sometimes memory is built from pavements, bridges, rain, the smell of old stone, the rush of people, a quiet churchyard, a market, a bookshop, a pub sign, a river at night. You do not have to stand in front of a famous monument to feel London. Often the best version is found one street away from where everyone else is taking photographs.
Travel has taught me to look one street away. Japan gave me a different lesson entirely. If London reminds me that history is still breathing, Japan reminds me that ordinary life can be done with extraordinary care. I have written before about my admiration for the Japanese toilet, which may not sound like the beginning of a serious philosophy, but then most great truths are discovered in unexpected places. A Japanese man once explained to me that if your hands were dirty you would not simply wipe them with paper and consider the matter solved. Yet somehow, across much of the world, we have convinced ourselves that this is perfectly acceptable for a far more dramatic area of the body.
That is travel at its best. It makes the familiar suddenly look absurd.
Japan made me question everyday habits I had never thought to question. The trains, the manners, the food, the quiet rituals, the precision, the cleanliness, the sense that attention itself can be a form of respect. I did not come away thinking Japan was perfect. No country is. But I came away thinking differently, and that is more valuable than a fridge magnet.
Travel should disturb us gently. It should not merely confirm what we already believe. It should say, “Look, there are other ways of arranging life, and some of them involve better public transport and cleaner lavatories.”
Finland taught me calm. Not the kind of calm sold by wellness companies in neutral-coloured bottles, but real calm. The calm of space, silence, lakes, forests, saunas and people who do not feel the need to fill every gap in conversation with noise. There is something almost radical about a country where quiet does not feel like failure.
Finland is also wonderfully inconvenient for people who insist that happiness is created by low taxes and everyone fighting for themselves in the grand supermarket of modern anxiety. Finland has repeatedly been ranked among the happiest countries in the world, yet it is also a highly taxed society. That does not mean Finns leap joyfully from bed singing songs about VAT. Nobody loves tax that much, and anyone who does should probably be watched carefully. But Finland suggests that happiness may have something to do with trust, security, education, healthcare, public services, social order and the feeling that if life goes wrong, you may not immediately fall through the floor.
That is a serious lesson.
It is easy to imagine happiness as a private possession, something we buy, chase, polish and display. Finland suggests happiness may also be public. It may live in roads that work, schools that function, doctors who can be reached, buses that arrive, and a society that has not entirely replaced the social contract with customer service hold music.
Travel gives us these comparisons. It allows us to come home with better questions. Why do they do that better? Why do we tolerate this? Why are their trains cleaner? Why is their healthcare less terrifying? Why can they build a public toilet that does not feel like a scene from a prison escape film?
Italy, meanwhile, taught me that pleasure is not a moral weakness. The Italians seem to understand that food, conversation, art, architecture, family, sunlight and taking time over a meal are not interruptions to life. They are life. This is a useful lesson for anyone raised in a culture where lunch can be treated as an obstacle between two meetings.
In Italy, I was reminded that civilisation is not only measured by productivity. It is measured by how people eat, talk, gather, walk, argue, laugh and pause. A country that gives the world art, music, churches, ruins, design, pasta and coffee has earned the right to be taken seriously when it says, in effect, “Sit down, eat properly and stop behaving as though the inbox is a sacred text.”
Italy is not calm in the Finnish sense. It is not orderly in the Japanese sense. It is not layered like London. It has its own instruction: enjoy being alive while there is still time. This seems obvious until you realise how many people forget it.
Egypt taught me scale. There are places in the world that make human life feel brief, and Egypt is one of them. To stand near ancient stones, temples and tombs is to be reminded that our modern worries, however loud, are not always as large as they claim to be. We think our arguments are eternal. Then we stand beside something built thousands of years ago and realise most of our urgent concerns will not survive the next software update.
Egypt is humbling because it makes time visible. It turns history into weight, heat, stone and shadow. It reminds us that people before us loved, feared, ruled, worked, worshipped, built and disappeared. The world moved on. The stones remained. There is a strange comfort in that, though it is not the kind that fits easily into a travel brochure.
That is another gift of travel. It corrects the size of the self.
Daily life can make us believe we are the centre of everything. Our appointments, grievances, bills, passwords, aches, opinions and delayed parcels grow enormous because they are close to us. Travel pulls the camera back. It says, “Yes, your problems matter, but look at this river, this temple, this street, this mountain, this ruin, this family eating dinner, this stranger laughing at something you do not understand.”
The world is not smaller because we are worried. It remains huge, indifferent, beautiful and occasionally better organised.
I think travel enhances happiness because it gives memory more furniture. The mind needs places to go. On difficult days, I can return inwardly to a London street, a Japanese train, a Finnish shoreline, an Italian meal, an Egyptian temple. These memories do not solve problems, but they widen the room in which the problems sit. They remind me I have been elsewhere, seen differently, survived confusion, learned things, laughed at mistakes and returned with a slightly larger version of myself.
That is not nothing.
People often say travel broadens the mind, which is true, though it also broadens the waist if Italy is involved. But the phrase has become so familiar that we no longer hear it properly. A broadened mind is not simply a mind that has collected destinations. It is a mind less certain of its own superiority. It has seen other systems, other habits, other ways of eating, waiting, greeting, travelling, cleaning, governing and being quiet. It has discovered that “normal” usually means “what I grew up with”.
That discovery is liberating.
It is also funny. Travel reveals how absurd we all are. Every country has customs that make perfect sense to locals and appear completely mad to visitors. Then we come home and realise our own customs are not exactly evidence of divine planning either. We are all improvising civilisation with varying degrees of confidence.
Perhaps that is why I like writing about travel. I am not interested in pretending to be a flawless guide with perfect luggage and spiritual trousers. I am interested in the human experience of being somewhere else. The surprise, discomfort, pleasure, embarrassment, wonder and small victories. Finding the station. Ordering the meal. Misreading the sign. Standing in the right place by accident. Discovering that a stranger can be kind even when you are obviously confused.
Travel restores faith in people, though not always in airports.
It also teaches patience. You cannot travel well while demanding that every country behave like your own. That is not travel. That is colonialism with a wheelie bag. To travel properly, you have to let go of control. You have to accept that things will be different, and that different is not automatically wrong. Sometimes it is better. Sometimes it is worse. Sometimes it is merely different, which is annoying because the mind prefers judgement to humility.
This is where travel becomes philosophical. It asks us to practise curiosity before criticism. It asks us to notice before deciding. It asks us to live, briefly, inside uncertainty. That is good for us. Certainty makes people brittle. Curiosity keeps them alive.
I have been fortunate to travel, and I know that. Not everyone can. Money, health, work, family and circumstance can limit movement. But travel is not only about distance. It is also about attention. You can travel badly across the world and learn nothing. You can travel well across a town and return changed. The essential act is not the flight. It is the willingness to see.
Still, there is a particular joy in being physically elsewhere. The first morning in a new country. The unfamiliar light. The different breakfast. The street sounds. The moment you realise you do not quite know what is happening, but for once that feels exciting rather than alarming. You become awake in a way routine rarely allows.
Routine is useful. It pays bills, keeps houses functioning and prevents us from living entirely on pastries. But routine also dulls the senses. Travel sharpens them again. It makes us notice doors, roofs, signs, faces, smells, gestures, water, food, weather and silence. It returns us to the world.
Perhaps that is why travel becomes more important as I get older. It is not because I wish to collect countries like stamps. It is because I understand more clearly that life is not endless. Memories matter. Experiences matter. The stories we gather become part of what remains when the busy parts of life fall away.
In the end, travel has given me more than places. It has given me perspective. London gave me memory. Japan gave me attention. Finland gave me calm. Italy gave me pleasure. Egypt gave me humility. Each place left something behind, and together they have made my life feel larger than it would have been if I had stayed safely within the familiar.
That is why I travel, and why I write about travel.
Not to boast. Not to tick boxes. Not to pretend every journey is profound, because some journeys are mainly queues, delays and a sandwich of uncertain origin. I travel because the world keeps teaching me, and I am old enough to know I still need teaching.
I go away, and I come back different.
Sometimes only slightly.
But slightly, repeated over a lifetime, is how a person is made.