Whenever we travel, we encounter opportunities for growth, for transcending our limitations, and for experiencing cross-cultural union.

By Don George

One of the most rewarding trips of my life was a five-day solo odyssey I made a few summers ago around the Japanese island of Shikoku. Shikoku has been a place of pilgrimage since the ninth century, when the beloved scholar and monk Kobo Daishi established a path of 88 Buddhist temples that circle the island. Completing this circuit is supposed to give you great wisdom, purity, and peace, but I was on a pilgrimage of another kind. My wife grew up on this island, and I had first visited it with her some 20 years before. Now I had returned to see if the singular beauty, serenity, and slow pace of the place I remembered—and the country kindness of its residents—had survived.

A few hours into my journey, I stopped a wizened woman, clad in the pilgrim’s traditional white garb and cone-shaped straw hat, scuffling along a leaf-paved path. She was on her second temple circuit, she told me. “The thing about the pilgrimage,” she said, “is that it makes your heart lighter; it energizes you. It refreshes your sense of the meaning of life.” Then her eyes locked into mine, deep and shining as a cloudless sky.

During my five days on Shikoku, I ate fresh-from-the-sea sashimi with fishermen, philosophized in steaming public baths with farmers, spun bowls with fifth-generation potters, and talked baseball and benevolence with Buddhist monks. I lay down in rice paddies, lost myself in ancient forests, stared at the sun-spangled sea, and listened—with the help of an 80-year-old “translator” I had met as she was mending a fishing net on a pier—to the whispers of ghosts in the trees. By the end of my odyssey, I too felt lighter, refreshed, and energized, but not because of the sanctified sites. The island itself had become one big temple for me.

That trip confirmed a truth I had sensed during two decades of wandering: You dont have to travel to Jerusalem, Mecca, Santiago de Compostela, or any other explicitly holy site to be a pilgrim. If you travel with reverence and wonder, with a lively sense of the potential and preciousness of every moment and every encounter, then wherever you go, you walk the pilgrim’s path.

A New Self in a New World

I began to learn this after I graduated from college and moved to Athens, Greece, to teach for a year. By the end of that year, the wonders of the world had ensnared me. I would sit for hours on the Acropolis, staring at the bone-white Parthenon, trying to absorb the perspective of the ancients. I consulted the crimson poppies and fluted marble fragments at Delphi. I meditated on Minoan marvels—bull dancers, mosaic makers—among the tangerine-colored columns of Knossos on Crete. I drank ouzo with fellow teachers and excavated the hidden truths of Aristotle and Kazantzakis on a sun-spattered terrace overlooking the Aegean. I danced with wild-haired women under bouzouki-serenaded stars. I fell in love with the world.

In his seminal essay, “Why We Travel,” Pico Iyer writes, “All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.” Travel stretches us so that our mental clothes don’t fit anymore; it reminds us over and over that the anchoring assumptions of our youth lose their hold in the global sea. Travel to strange places can make us strangers to ourselves, but it can also introduce us to all the exhilarating possibilities of a new self in a new world.

Inspired by my experience in Greece, I applied for a two-year fellowship to teach in a place that was far more foreign to me than anywhere I’d been before: Japan. I knew nothing of Japan’s customs, history, or language, but something was pulling me there. Trusting and terrified, I won the fellowship and took the plunge.

It was while I was living in Tokyo that the first great lesson of travel revealed itself to me: The more you offer yourself to the world, the more the world offers itself to you. This revelation began with my getting lost. I have an uncanny ability to become lost in even the most obvious circumstances, and in Japan, this predisposition was heightened by my inability to read Japanese. Because I was always losing my way, I had to learn to rely on people. And they came through: Time after time, Japanese students, housewives, and businessmen would walk or drive 15 or even 30 minutes out of their way to deliver me to the proper train platform, bus stop, or neighborhood. Sometimes they would even press little wrapped red-bean sweets or packets of tissues into my hands when they said good-bye.

Buoyed by these kindnesses, I traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia for the summer. Once again, I knew no one and couldn’t speak the language; I was at the mercy of the road. But I was beginning to trust. And as it turned out, everywhere I went, the more I opened myself up to people and relied on them, the more warmly and deeply they embraced and aided me: A family at an open-air restaurant in Kuala Lumpur noticed me smiling at their birthday celebration and invited me to join the feast; two boys in Bali pedaled me to a secret temple set among glistening rice paddies.