I’m absolutely in love with this video (hilarious graphics and all). “The point of travel is to go to places that can help us in our inner journey.” It’s inspired me to make my own commitment to traveling with more intention – not just checking off a list of destinations, but selecting and guiding journeys that can help with the edges I want to smooth out.

I’m a junkie for travel magazines (as my family knows, hence my receiving three subscriptions to three different magazines this past Christmas), and I devour them all from cover to cover when time permits. Which means I get to capture gems like this one in the Editor’s Letter of the June issue of Conde Nast Traveler:

…what all of these experiences have in common are the balance of joy and fear that only travel can bring. Being outside your comfort zone, absent the defining bumpers of your daily life, forces a kind of humility and openness. It is precisely that vulnerability that, ironically, has the power to embolden you to overcome any number of fears – fear of not being able to communicate in a foreign language, fear of feeling like a rube, fear of being a tourist rather than a traveler, fear of the lip at the top of the double black diamond run that you’re determined to get down…. That we get to break our own stereotypes of ourselves when we are in different places is perhaps the greatest pleasure of all.

THAT is why I travel – and to me, what the spirit of exploring is all about. So my promise to myself is to recapture that feeling even when I am in the “defining bumpers” of my life here in DC.  Find the time, no matter where you are, to break your own stereotypes.

In 1915, John Erskine, then an English professor at Columbia University, published a seminal essay titled “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” which lamented a perceived lack of faith in intelligence (that is the collection of knowledge and skills) as a critical virtue.  (The title was later used for a collection of essays  by famed literary critic Lionel Trilling, one of Erskine’s students in the 1920). This is the part where I admit that I haven’t actually read the essay – it’s on my long “to do” list – but explain why the simple title and message of the essay inspired this blog. I am in no way an expert on morality – though I think most of us who observe the current shenanigans in Washington would probably all argue that if the pursuit of intelligence was considered a moral virtue, we’d probably have a much more functional government – but I do fundamentally believe that by obliging ourselves to explore new ideas, places, subjects, etc., we are all the better for it. I recently came across a great quote from Mark Twain that summed it up perfectly for me:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

But I think the “obligation” to explore is actually in each of our DNA – the desire to acquire knowledge, learn new things, consider new ways of approaching a problem is what has advanced mankind to what it is today. It just manifests itself in different ways. On my first day of graduate school at Thunderbird, we were introduced to Dr. Mansour Javidan, who started off by asking us a series of questions: Do you consider yourself to be a restless and curious person? Do you get bored after a few years at a job and find yourself wanting to pursue a new career? Are you passionate about traveling to new places, seeing new things? I was nodding enthusiastically and noticed that everyone else around me was too. It turns out that we weren’t just a group of people with a lack of focus or direction, but actually we had the beginnings of the characteristics needed to develop a “global mindset” – a crucial set of skills (as defined by academic research) for managing in an increasingly interconnected world. For the first time I stopped worrying about becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none” and realized that my curiosity and restlessness could be my biggest strength.

I don’t think the advantages of developing a global mindset, or the desire to explore, is limited to the professional world. Nor do I think exploring means traveling to the ends of the earth. For me personally, travel is a big part of it – but so are explorations in learning new things and pushing myself in new ways. So this blog is about my personal journey of exploration – to ensure that I fulfill my own personal obligation to explore. So you’ll find stuff about the things I love – travel, wine, food and fitness (yes, some of these things do not totally go together) – but also about new things I’m exploring, starting with reading the essay that inspired the name of the blog. If others learn a thing or two along the way, then great – if not, to my parents who will likely be my only readers, thanks for your support!

Here’s to exploration…