I lean back in my armchair and contemplate this important inquiry that I am so often confronted with since returning back home to the US after a long journey.

Trying to come up with a coherent response to this seemingly overwhelming and complex question, my head drifts back, eyes shut, and I think back to the past eight months on the road.

All that comes to my mind is a slide-show of warm and welcoming faces from the innumerable wonderful friends that I’ve had the pleasure to cross paths with on the trip.

Many differences are quickly apparent among this unceasing stream of people: different beliefs and customs, different languages, different forms of self-expression, different temperaments and personalities.

I could go on and on, listing off the dissimilarities, but in sum, all of the differences are trumped by a unifying commonality: humanity.

A Teacher In Every Face

Going back to our original conundrum, “What has traveling taught me?”

Through traveling and coming into contact with so many different types of people, I now better understand how similar, in fact, we all are.

Through traveling, I have learned that we are all different peas stemming from the same pod, often with similar hang-ups, aspirations, fears and desires.

Traveling has taught me to expand that circle of brotherhood, encapsulating not just immediate family and friends, not just the members of our town or the citizenry of US or Europe for that matter, but rather all of humanity.

In short, traveling has taught me to be human.

The failure to grasp this simple notion-treating others as human beings-is at the heart of much misunderstanding, aggression, and strife that has plagued humanity throughout time.

Traveling has also taught me to not take life too seriously, but at the same time stand back mouth ajar and awe-stricken by its miraculousness.

Most of all, traveling has taught me to seize every waking moment as an opportunity-an opportunity to learn, to grow, and most of all, to live.

Adrift in the Universe

By no means am I saying that traveling is a pre-requisite to the understanding of these traveler credos that I’ve put forth. Like the writer Dagobert D. Runes once said

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

Traveling with an inquisitive and open mind does facilitate this process and fosters its development.

Many of us live in a society, the US, where only around 10% of us have passports, and due to a lack of intercultural understanding, have dangerous isolationist and non-cooperative views of the world.

This is obviously an important topic, but a more central message for me is to generate an interest in decisive action.

If that decision towards action comes to fruition in deciding to quit your job or stop doing whatever you’re doing to make that extended traveling trip that you’ve always dreamed of, then power to you.

But that’s just a tiny example of a much broader theme in taking command of the life that we live.

Invisible Bars

To me, it seems as though so many people live lives of mediocrity, burdened by an overhanging fear of failure preventing us from taking action to better position ourselves for the life that we desire.

The mighty ‘f’ word-failure-plagues us, leaving us in a paralyzed ‘what if’ mindset, questioning our past decisions-or better yet lack of-and striving for certitude in our existences.

This deep-seeded fear of failure is a direct impediment to interpersonal growth and is one of the main reasons that as a species we’re so terrified of change and uncertainty.

But if we really grasp the truism that failure is a mental construct-an internal representation of the world around us in that we create-and in reality there are just outcomes in which we can always learn something, then what’s stopping us from leaving in the dust this life of mediocrity and achieving greatness?

We have all the tools to forge greatness in each of our lives, however you may decide to define it.

The problem lies in our obliviousness to the enormity of our potential power: specifically the grave misunderstanding of the procession of change which is at the heart of this human plight.

Free Your World View

The human mind has a lot of difficulty grappling with the inherent non-linear and asymmetric nature of change, and as such we are often fooled into thinking that the energy involved in invoking change should be roughly equal with that of the outputs or its effects.

This view of change, besides simply being incorrect, also fosters a mentality of complacency and passiveness in action, as well as creating a nihilistic view of the world in which we are all just powerless and static beings.

Fact of the matter is we are not creatures living in isolated vacuums, often tiny inputs inevitably will have huge far-reaching effects, and our actions do have an immediate impact not only on our lives but throughout our intricately webbed world and its history.

Change often begets more change, and the mere decision to act reflexively changes us thereby further affecting the outcome.

Now understanding this concept of change, the decision that confronts us is not whether or not we want to change the world-we inevitably are and will just by living in it and acting-we rather must decide on the magnitude and direction of our effect.

A Personal Experience

Here’s a personal example highlighting the far-reaching implications of decisive action in creating change.

About four years ago or so, I decided for whatever reason to stop watching TV and to start reading everything that I felt would give me a better understanding of the world and would aid in making me a more evolved person.

The direct cause of this decision I can’t recall, but obviously something triggered it, pushing me over that proverbial tipping point towards action.

Anyway, this decision was a pretty big commitment for me, because only a few years before that, in the middle of my sophomore year in college, I had just finished reading my very first proper book from front to back.

Fast forward to today, where I’ve embraced a philosophy of change and its conduciveness towards growth.

My decisions to go to graduate school in Spain, to head off into my travels through Asia; all these actions are manifestations of a philosophy that I have come to understand through the synthesis of ideas put forth by other writers interacting with my ever-changing experiences.

That decision made four years ago set my life on a completely different trajectory.

Additionally, the life trajectories of many of the people that I’ve encountered throughout the past few years have all been altered to some degree all as a direct result of that one decision that I made four years ago.

These same people will alter the life trajectories of many others indirectly through me, and those others affecting more and more others, and so on ad infinitum.

The Ripple Effect

The point of this little anecdote is not to soothe any megalomaniac desires on my part, but rather to show the extraordinary effect we can, and often inevitably will have, on ourselves, our immediate surroundings, and even the entirety of the world, through our decisive actions.

At any given time we can choose whether to be active or passive players in this game of life; we can choose how and how much of an effect we will have.

We can choose the immortal imprints that we leave upon this world.

The first step is the decision to take action and the direction that you would like to head; the rest is all just a continual re-writing of the history books.

Through our actions, specifically actions through ideas, we can reach the plains of immortality.

In a similar spirit, hopefully some of the ideas that I talk about, ideas which where borne from countless other thinkers’ ideas, may act as that same trigger towards positive action in some of your lives and might continue living onwards.

A version of this article was originally published here. Reprinted with permission.

Tim Witting details his wanderings around the world on his blog Tim’s Nomad Diaries.

During the ninth month of the Muslim calender, falling between mid September to mid October, Ramadan is a time where Muslim followers around the world abstain from all food and drink (including water) each day while the sun is up, for an entire month.

As I understand, Ramadan is about focusing less on the daily rigors of everyday life, and more on what matters the most: God.

It is about the realization that we are all on this planet together, with some more fortunate than others. The aim of Ramadan is to experience suffering, like so many people are forced to live through, and to understand that we are no better than anyone else. All of us are same in God’s eyes.

While in Shenzen, China, I fasted with the some Muslim friends for one full day, but the idea stayed with me longer than the 24 hours. It was something I wanted to do again in the future, when the time was right.

As it turns out, being stuck in the middle of Hanoi, Vietnam with just a few dollars in your pocket is just such a time.

My fasting guidelines were basic: for one full week, I would not consume any means of nourishment, with the exclusion of water, until after sunset, at which time I would have a moderate dinner.

The motivation behind my decision to fast was quite different from that of Ramadan: not religious, but spiritual – of a practical, hell, even selfish nature, rooted in self-development and obtaining a greater appreciation for life and all that comes with it.

The River Or The Cork

To understand this link between fasting, or any form of self-deprivation, with a heightened sense of appreciation of life, I first must give the reader a little background.

Pretend for a moment that you are the ‘average’ Westerner, and I showed you a photograph of yourself when you were five years old. I then ask you who the person is in the photo, and you respond “Oh, that’s me.”

But, how could that small child be the same person as the adult that I am showing the picture to? And surely you behave and think differently from that child as well, right? You respond, “Yes, but that was me.”

Most of us have this idea that we are separate and distinct beings independent from our surroundings. Even the word ‘Self’ literally means other.

We think in terms of ‘I’s and ‘You’s and ‘We’s like we are static creatures in an ever moving and changing world, like a cork floating down a river of time. Our surroundings might be continually changing, you say, but there is something distinct and unwaivering about who you are that remains the same.

This view that most of us hold, that of a static ’self’, is inherently and deeply flawed.

Think about it for a moment. From a purely physical standpoint, we are changing every nanosecond, with old cells dying and new ones being reborn; our physical composition, much like our surroundings, is in a continual state of flux.

In addition to our dynamic chemical and physical make-up, our beliefs about the world, our thoughts and perceptions, are also always changing.

Surely you don’t have the exact same mentality and views as you had when you where a child, but you also don’t have the exact same mentality and views as you had last year, or even a few moments ago before reading this article.

The Limitations of Language

Instead of the flawed view of the ’self’ as static beings, I prefer to think of people as dynamic, in a constant state of flux. A person at any point in time is the product of a complex function of different variables interacting, some of which are constantly changing, thereby creating a new ‘you’ every moment.

The function is essentially just the interplay between our genetic code, which is fixed, and our experiences, which is changing by the moment. Since one of the variables making up our ’self’ is in a constant state of change, our ’self’ must also be constantly changing.

As such, whenever I refer to ‘myself’ or someone ‘else’, I mentally put quotations around the ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘we’, because by defining ourselves through language, we convey a distorted view of reality.

In addition to our dynamic nature, we can also see that we are fooling ourselves into thinking that we are separate and independent entities from the rest of the world.

Since who we are at any point in time is largely predicated by our experiences and surroundings, we only exist in relation to all the other constantly changing things in the world.

Going back to our cork in the river analogy, we can see how this is flawed because we are also constantly changing and interconnected with the river. Rather, we are the river.

On Cultivating Compassion

This view of the world I find to be extremely powerful and intellectually satisfying. Since we are constantly changing, there is no need to have regrets-only learn from them.

Since people are the product of their past experiences, as well as other factors out of their control, it teaches us compassion towards our fellow humans.

If every moment that passes us is an experience, and every experience is an opportunity towards self-development and improvement, what’s the point of doing anything that isn’t advantageous to our environment and ourselves (i.e. watching mindless television, unnecessary complaining, creating negative energy etc.), and thereby towards our future ‘me’?

Since we have control of our future experiences, but not of our past ones, what’s the point of not focusing on this very moment?

This perspective on life teaches us that we are the masters of our destiny. When we think of ourselves as ’static beings’ we are in bondage, slaves to our pasts; but as ‘dynamic beings’ we know that we create the future, and our potential effect on this jumbled-mess-of-a-world is in fact infinite.

If we think of ourselves as the cork, we are prisoners, but as the river we are free to go any way we please. Free to be.

And, importantly, since we understand that we are just part of this whole constantly changing flux, we can realize that nothing is permanent. Holding on to anything, any form of attachment, is the source of much of our angst.

Letting Go Of Attachment

We conceptualize things as being static instead of what they are, transitory, and thereby we are pained when we inevitably lose what we like, what we love, and run away from those things which we don’t like or fear.

But if we accept that all of Life is evanescent, then we can truly appreciate those emotions we like, and at the same time understand those emotions we don’t care for are only temporary. We deal with them.

Tying all this in with the idea that self-deprivation can be beneficial to one’s being, we can see how the suffering we endure is transitory and an opportunity for potential growth.

By saturating our inner-most being with our emotions instead of running away from them, we understand each one of those emotions that much better. When we feel hunger, we also really feel the satisfaction on the other end of the spectrum when we experience nourishment.

The Verdict

With each meal during my fasting, all of my senses were heightened.

The slow savoring of every delectable bite of even the most basic dishes, the aroma from the dish entering my body, the breeze from the fan above me, the dancing bright bright red rose at my table, the splitter spat sound from the fountain behind me and the chattering of the Vietnamese couple at the table at the other end of the otherwise deserted restaurant.

Fasting brought me complete and unadulterated Nirvana over the course of the meal, an inability to think of anything else but all that was around me at that very moment-reveling in the moment.

I truly believe that temporary self-inflicted-deprivation of some kind is the panacea that many people stuck in our over-consumptive society really need. Many of us Westerners live a life in which everything is handed to us on a silver spoon, an existence devoid of struggle.

We are pleasure seekers who run from the first hint of discomfort and that which we fear. But by doing so, by not experiencing all these emotions which we think of as suffering, we deaden our senses and take much of the great material life we have right in front of us for granted.

Through temporary deprivation, we learn to fully appreciate our existence.

Tim Witting details his wanderings around the world on his blog Tim’s Nomad Diaries.