[Essay]Why I travel

Why I Travel: Isn't traveling the best way to grow taller?

I grew 10 centimeters a year in middle school. Being tall is a good thing. It means you can look up from the back of the person in front of you in the movie theater, you can get to the ball a little quicker when playing soccer, and your pants fit a little better. Of course, being taller for a short period of time can hurt your joints, but that’s just growing pains.

Growing up in the provinces, I only knew the world through books. We were poor, and my hardworking parents only knew how to work.

Let's go to an amusement park this Children's Day

I'm going to go to my grandma's house in the country and help her with the farming.

My family’s weekends were always mortgaged to my grandparents who farmed in the nearby countryside, and there were no exceptions for Children’s Day or Christmas. At the time, a six-day work week was the norm, so the only day off was Sunday, when my family would head to my grandparents’ farm and help out until dusk.

I don’t know how much it helped me at such a young age, but I think I did more than my fair share later in life, as I worked my way through elementary and middle school.

That’s why I still jokingly say to my wife, who is from the city, “I’m a city girl.

I've done a little bit of everything farming

Farming requires hard work and perseverance, as you have to repeat thousands or tens of thousands of times in the same position. In the recent drama “My Liberation Diary,” which I enjoyed watching, there are often scenes of farming, and the character Chang-hee (played by Lee Min-ki), who wears rubber bands and a hat to protect herself from sunburn, was probably in my mind at the time.

Ironically, the experience of helping my grandparents farm and working in the fields for five or six hours at a time helped me study in college. Maybe it’s because I’m used to hard work, perseverance, and sticking with things even when I don’t want to.

While I grew physically taller in middle school, I grew mentally taller in college.

After taking the SAT exam, I got into college and headed to Seoul. I moved from city to city, but the difference between the provincial cities and Seoul was huge. The more I talked to my friends from all over the country, the more I realized the poverty of the experience.

If you go to New York, there's a place called Broadway...

The Vatican is in Rome...

It came out of the mouths of my friends as they talked, but as someone who had never traveled, it made me feel both envious and inferior.

The summer before my freshman year of college, I had walked the Hallyu, traveled to Mongolia on my first trip abroad, and worked as a volunteer at an international sporting event. It was a jam-packed schedule with only a few days off in a little over two months.

That summer, I felt like a big kid. We were all young, but as we walked the country roads on the Homecoming trek, I listened to my 27-year-old sister’s life story as a college graduate, and I empathized with her dream of living in New York City in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. The world was bigger than I thought it would be, and everyone had their own way of dealing with insecurities and inferiority complexes, a dash of insecurity and a spoonful of inferiority.

I think it was then.

Planning a trip to an unfamiliar place, meeting new people there, hearing their stories and dreaming of living in a different place in time and space. Of course, as the years passed, sometimes I got tired of traveling, and there were times when I wanted to settle down. But my motto of traveling and experiencing life hasn’t changed. That’s why I quit my job of more than 10 years and jumped into a new world.

The world my son will live in will be completely different from the world I’ve lived in, but I’m going to share one thing with him based on what I’ve learned so far.