Traveling is Not Fun

“Expect your heart to get a little bit broken, in fact shattered and scattered…but there’s something beautiful about how we’ll be changed by one another” – Jordan Edelheit

Jordan  joined our internship program this past summer as our Communications Coordinator in Southeast Asia.  As someone who has always jumped at the opportunity to explore and learn from the stories around her, Jordan has learned a thing or two about using the power of words to forge common ground and understanding. Before joining our team, she organized  and curated TEDxMarionCorrectional, the world’s first TEDx event inside an adult correctional facility revolving around social justice and incarceration reform. She also interviewed, filmed and documented the stories of 140 social entrepreneurs during an 8,344-mile, cross country journey.

Jordan’s spoken word poem, Traveling is Not Fun, written and produced while she was in Thailand with us this summer, sums up my own travel experiences perfectly. In it, she dives into the intricacies that make traveling challenging, confusing, remarkable, and life-changing all at the same time.

There is something beautiful about the way immersing yourself in a different place, surrounded by different people changes you, and yet,  it can be hard to see this beauty when you’re hot and sticky and dirty and bug bitten and tired and homesick, or confused about what is going around you because you don’t speak the same language as everyone talking around you.

Travel is complicated and it’s not always fun, but as Jordan says in her poem, it’s during those not so fun parts that you’re able to “find community in a place that was once deemed ‘the other.’” And as any traveler knows, that’s what makes the act of traveling so wonderful and what makes us realize that as human beings “we’re all just here to be.”

Watch her video. I promise it will make you want to stop whatever you’re doing and get in a car, on a plane, or a bike, or your own two feet and start wandering in the direction of your next adventure.