How travel is flowing by virtue?

Flow! What comes to your mind when you hear this word? Dance, River, may be life. Flow though is now a legit concept in positive psychology born out of rigorous qualitative research and it refers to the lived experience of people of “being in the zone” while doing something!

You know how sometimes you get so immersed in a task that you forget about everything else for a while, lose sense of time and simply devote all your attention to that one task at hand. It could be solving a puzzle, playing a video game, dancing to your favorite song or reading your favorite book.

Research shows that flow is an extremely positive state to be in, and has incredible benefits to increasing life satisfaction and emotional well being. As I read up more about this, the only thing I could think of was — travel. An act, that for many of us, is the best kind of flow we might have experienced in our life. It could be small parts of the journey or the journey itself. But flow is written all over traveling and here is how.

There are 9 dimensions to flow ( that’s right, I did my homework) and travel carries every single one of it.

Clear goals and steps: Traveling is the sweet spot between structure and chaos. Your itinerary , the precious piece of checklist made by you or your localite is something that always gives you clear goals and steps. You might be a let’s go with the flow (pun intended) kind of a traveler, or someone who takes their color coded binder with list of activities along with them, but we all know what we are going for — the experience. Travel gives you clear goals in the same way a good book does.

Immediate Feedback: Flow comes when you know what you are doing. When you immediately know if you are doing something right or wrong, if it feels good or bad and you can immediately switch and not get distracted. Travel by virtue is full of immediate emotions and the ‘here and now’ experience of the city, town, village or forest. You might be hiking or having a meal with the locals, by the nature of experience, you always get immediate feedback from within and outside, about how it is going and what needs to change. This is why often tourists get disappointed on their journeys. They go in for some magical idea of the city and realize the tourist spots are always crowded and ultimately just a picture with a building. Take the feedback and change, move to the streets, festivals, and families of the city, and see what they have to offer.

Balance between challenges and skills: As we always say at localites, travel is not always pretty and that’s the beauty of it. One cannot experience flow while doing easy comfortable tasks. Even a spa gets boring in some time. It is the right amount of challenge that gets our juices flowing (pun intended again!) Traveling is challenging enough to get you exhausted after long walks, or spending a day helping the local craftsmen, volunteering to clean up the beach or dance all evening with the artists of the town. It is a safe space to experiment, to explore and to be uncomfortable at the right amount of spice.

Merging of actions and awareness: This one is rather obvious. For someone like me, whose brain is never stimulated enough, traveling is the only space that takes up all my mental space. When at home or at work, I always need at least 5 things to do at a time. No kind of action is enough for the amount of awareness my mind holds. But when we step into a different city, the two meet. All you think about is what is happening, what am I doing right now, feeling right now and what do I do next. It is only when you step into a new world, that your actions and awareness come into a sync, because this is not something your brain is used to handling, and it will not take anything for granted.

Distractions are excluded from consciousness: Traveling is not free of distraction but art of distraction. Everything that distracts you or fascinates you is actually what you are meant to focus on. Everything is a part of the experience. If you are playing at the beach, and flamingos fly by, they are not distractions but additions to your experience. I am kind of overwhelmed right now about how traveling is just naturally a perfect activity. I don’t have to learn to meditate or concentrate in order to stay focused on the city. The mind will take us everywhere it is supposed to go.

No worry of Failure: Do I even have to say anything? No matter what you do, you cannot fail at traveling. Throw yourself into new places, and you experience travel. Whatever it is, however it is.

Self Conscious Disappears: This element might be different for everyone. Traveling might make some extremely self conscious. Sometimes the fact that you are ‘foreign’ to a city may be very obvious, there are high possibilities of you standing out in a crowd. You may be too dark or too fair or have different clothes or a different style. So may be being self conscious is a part of the journey for some of us, but the more we get used to it, the more it disappears. Once as a traveler, you reach that point where your self conscious disappears, you not only experience greater flow in travel, but greater flow in life, because everything you learn on your journeys, you inevitably take them back home.

Sense of Time becomes distorted: What is the one thing we all say at the end of our vacations? “I can’t believe it’s already over”. You are meant to lose sense of time. A day might seem like a week, and a week might seem like an hour. Time dances around slow and fast when you are out there — flowing across the globe. And well, jet lag only adds to this. Haha.

Autotelic: The act of traveling is done for itself. There is not end goal, or a profit or a trophy that we expect out of it. The flow comes because traveling is done for the sake of it.

And well, that’s something for you all. There are pretty and poetic ways to describe why travel is amazing, but today the nerd in me wanted to share a full on conceptual framework with you. I hope this makes you think about how often we really experience flow in life, sometimes force ourselves to create it just to be able to get work done. Sure our capitalists lives are amazing in their own oppressive ways, but just put yourself out there every once in a while, meet locals, and you will come back as a better self who will conquer life with an emotionally strong brain.

We as a global community care for every everyone's safety. So before making any travel plans to any city, connect with a localite friend for free and get their inputs about the coronavirus condition in the city you're going to.

Stay safe and stay home.

Have a good day!
Team Localites