A journey is best measured in friends, not miles. | Tim Cahill
~
I’ve always been the type to have friends from lots of different groups. The housemates, the newspaper friends, the music friends, the writing friends, the artistic friends, the party friends, the outdoorsy friends, the work out friends. It’s a pleasure to explore interests with all these people, but I always felt a certain emptiness when pondering who MY TRIBE was. The truth was I didn’t have one crew that embodied me. I didn’t have one core group of friends. When I get older and everyone plans yearly squad trips to Lake Tahoe or Joshua Tree or Coachella, I will be sitting at home twiddling my thumbs.
I constantly thought about who my community was, and that is what I found when I went traveling. In hostels I found my community: people who were brave enough to leave home for a solo adventure, who were stoked on seeing a new city, and who hustled to make the trip happen. These were artists, thinkers, teachers, people in love with life on the road. Mom has always said that I love variety and if I need one thing in life, variety is what it is. While traveling and living in hostels, I found kindred souls who also required variety as a source of energy.
And I guess that’s what has me so addicted. Yes hostel showers are occasionally questionable, and often the mattress springs have seen better days and sometimes all you want is your own bed. But it’s the common room, the dinner table or the couch where people gather and are friendly enough to introduce themselves to strangers that the magic happens.
I’m addicted to meeting people who I instantly connect with, who I say deep secrets to within a few hours of knowing them. In travel you become fast at making friends. Although this tactic seems forced and disingenuous back home, it’s the norm here at the hostel.
I always like to say that making friends on the road is like being a little kid at a sleepover again. Sleepovers are where you spill secrets when you’re a kid and where the bonding happens. Later on in life, you make good friends and great friends. But how many of them do you spend enough quality time with to actually reveal a piece of your soul to them? How many times have you been too stressed from work to break into a real conversation with someone you care about?
I think this is part of the reason why music festivals and group trips are so important to young adults, because it is a free space without judgment where what happens there stays there and you get into the deep together. You crawl into the rabbit hole together, you go down the meaningful road. There’s no distractions to take away from the shared experience.
And when you’re travelling, you enter this space constantly, and it’s immensely rewarding. You meet a person who you instantly connect with and BOOOOOM you learn a million things about yourself in the process. And you take what you learned from that person and you imbed it into yourself. You take little pieces of the people you meet and carry them with you for the rest of your life.