A departure from the norm

IN OUR present era of budget airlines, where you can change countries for less than the price of your weekly groceries, the idea of travel being life-changing is under a little pressure.

As soon as travel becomes just another something we do, an event no more notable or special than many other events, its capacity to wave a wand over our existence diminishes.

One of the more depressing attributes of modern man and woman is the ability so many of us have picked up to view without reflection and without the experience registering in anything but the most superficial way. The youthful attitude, "Been there, done that, what else is new?" leads to sameness, not change.

Timothy Bates, professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, points out: "What people see depends not just on where they go, but how open they are." Openness, he points out, is a measurable personality factor. It varies hugely from person to person. Some people remained sealed, as it were, inside their own world view, their own bubble, and it barely matters how rich and strange the world might be that passes by outside themselves. It is all mere spectacle and they engage with it either not at all, or only in ways that seem tailor made to reinforce the views they started with.

Typical here is the attitude that one's own culture is the best and finest flowering of civilisation and foreigners, which is to say, the people in whose country one happens to be standing, are by definition inferior.

Armed with this "philosophy", the only thing travel does for such a traveller is to confirm all their prejudices and assumptions about the world. Usually, having completed their Tour of Everything, such a person will either stop at home from that day forth or, if he or she does continue to travel, will return to the same "home from home" year after year.

Again, there is a comfortable quality to this and, if one has a high-stress job, there is nothing wrong with winding the stress levels down by going back to that nice little hotel you visit every year. Real change, the kind that breaks old routines and redirects the flow of one's days and ways to wholly new channels, requires a more – a great deal more than just travel.

In a sense, the dedicated traveller, the one who has been bitten hard by the travel bug and who just has to pack and go at least once or twice a year, or risk losing their sanity, is always potentially open to a life-changing event through travel. However, in reality, such a person tends to have two lives that run in parallel. Their "travel self" travels, their "work self" works, and they switch between the two. One could call this "life balancing" rather than "life changing".

The most magical thing about travel, after all, is difference. The true traveller resonates profoundly to the way another country does things, to the way their shops and coffee bars line the streets, to the lights of a foreign city gleaming off wet streets after a downpour, to the fresh feel of a foreign place. But what changes the true traveller into someone who is genuinely going to go through a life-changing experience, is when they stop perambulating through places and decide to stop and act like a local.

Learning the language and living and working in a "foreign" place until it becomes your place will change most people. A few decades on, you might think it was for the best, although your old friends and acquaintances back home might disagree when they finally get to see you again.

"He or she's gone native," they might say – a phrase which means both that you've tweaked their cultural prejudices and that quite a bit of your adopted culture is now floating about your person and habits.

On the other hand, many self-imposed exiles, after a lifetime spent in a foreign country, find themselves folding up their tents and heading back to their ancestral hunting grounds in their older years.

"Australia be damned, I want to see the streets of Glasgow again before I die," says the man in his 50s or 60s, buying his ticket home and totally forgetting the joy with which he shook the dust of those same streets off his heels as a young man.

Paddy O'Donal, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, says this attack of nostalgia that draws the exile home is statistically much more a male thing than a female thing. Ask the wife of the expat if she'd rather stop where she was Down Under and the odds are she'll say: "You bet, but the silly old sod's moping, so we'd best pack."