Travel is the way to happiness

Traveling teaches you to LIVE WITHOUT LIMITS

Apr 04, 2025

“Travel is the way to happiness,” my grandmother always said. I understood this as a child and was always thrilled when my parents took me everywhere. Only when I was 10 did my parents buy a car; until then, we always traveled by train.

My parents weren't wealthy, but they showed me the world that we could reach at the time. And I always loved going to the train station, which was the airport in my little world of the 60s. At that time, platform tickets still existed, which no one today is familiar with. You were only allowed on the platform if you purchased a ticket for 20 Pfennigs (Cent). For me, it was always a celebration when my parents bought me a platform ticket, which didn't always happen because my parents were frugal.

I loved the railroad, especially the old steam locomotives that still existed, the V200, the most modern diesel locomotive of its time, and the local transport wagons that had open platforms at the ends. I read timetables and knew how to get from A to B and how long it took.

For me, the railroad promised freedom and adventure, and my parents showed me Germany in this way—from the Baltic Sea to the Alps, from East to West. By age 10, I had already seen a lot of Germany. I also visited many churches and museums that had always been my parents' destinations. I found every trip exciting and always looked forward to seeing and getting to know more.

That changed when my parents bought a light blue Ford 12M auto, which I then came to love just as much as the railroad. Now, we traveled to all the cities and landscapes in Germany that my father thought were worth seeing. The radius expanded to include Austria, Switzerland, and northern Italy. To this day, I am grateful to my parents for showing me as much of the world as possible and igniting the spark of travel in me. It has not gone out to this day. I very rarely meet someone who knows Germany better than I do.

As a teenager, I discovered Europe with Interrail's help, a monthly rail card for young people. I explored England, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and Italy alone and with friends every summer in my youth. I always had enough money from the age of 14. Still, it never occurred to me to use anything other than youth hostels because I was with my friends and could meet many other young people who also traveled.

The travel bug has stayed with me, and I still love discovering the world. I have been able to visit many countries and fell in love with the Americas—from Canada to Chile, from Baja California to Tierra del Fuego.

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Because traveling makes you happy and educated, traveling opens your heart and gives you access to your feelings. Traveling shows you the polarity of life, whether you travel near or far. Close to home, you can see the polarity of life in your hometown or home country. And far away, you experience the polarity of homelessness and excessive wealth in many countries, the polarity of exuberant nature and rampant pollution in Brazil, and the polarity of traditional life and spirituality against the backdrop of boundless growth in China.

All the beautiful and bad things in the world that I could see have sharpened my perception. I was able to party with great people in Mexico City while a person was shot right next to us. I saw children in Asia who had almost nothing but were happy playing with what little they had.

Traveling helps you to focus and find your center. Good and bad, rich and poor, stupid and smart – everything in life is polar. And it is precisely this polarity of life that you recognize much better and more precisely through travel than when you are stuck in your daily grind. Therefore, get off your hamster wheel whenever you can. A visit to the local museum, where you have never been, is also a small journey.

It's not about how far you travel. It's about the fact that you travel in life. Dropouts who travel through Germany by bike often know more about life than the successful man who skis in Vail in winter, sits in Zanzibar in summer, and has been to Dubai and New York in between.

Travel has nothing to do with consumerism and only superficially with leisure time. But it has a lot to do with knowledge and self-knowledge. Both are the basis for true happiness and real contentment.

I have learned that it doesn't matter how, where, or with whom you travel. Every journey brings you new insights into yourself and thus sustainably builds your happiness. You must approach your travels with an open mind and curiosity because even trips you don't like will help you grow.

If you decide to walk Your Path to Yourself in the future, you will travel and find yourself. You will never hear this noise again — it will be gone. For this, I have written a little book.

It is a call to shape and experience your life in all its depth consciously.

Make a conscious decision to shape your life and order Your Path to Yourself on Amazon today. You can purchase the book in three different editions:

For example, I don't particularly like cruises. But on cruises, you frequently get to know people much better than in their everyday lives; for me, it's like an oversized sociogram. You see relaxed people, you see hectic people. On cruises, you can see perfectly who is traveling and who is searching. Travelers also arrive at a destination on cruises. At the same time, seekers usually never find it – and typically don't even know this is the case. Which, in turn, wonderfully shows the polarity of our lives.

Traveling is an essential part to LIVE WITHOUT LIMITS.

Traveling allows you to experience more limits than any other activity in human life — limits in the world and within you. The limits within you that you discover through traveling are those you experience and can thus leave behind and forget. Traveling opens your mind. If you let yourself go completely, your heart will as well.

Promised!

The more you travel, the better you understand with every single journey on YOUR PATH TO YOURSELF:

The best is yet to come!

Everybody who wants to LIVE WITHOUT LIMITS must leave their known world, routines, and daily life.

Here you can find some ideas on how to do this: