Travel is exciting. Travel is accessible and easy. Travel is a constantly-improving global industry. People love to travel. Also, the desire for more travel is misguided.
Most people — and certainly those educated in the liberal arts — recognize that accessible, affordable, easy, and exciting things warrant abundant caution. All humans can excessively indulge in these things, and most are fully aware of it. Most people will freely volunteer that they should consume less TV, or caffeine, or nicotine, or that they should shop or party less.
But rarely if ever does anyone express a need to travel less. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The greater issue is whether people feel they ought to travel more. Because like any good, travel has its time and place, and the urge to exceed both is immense. But it’s an urge that should not be sated.
That’s not because it’s a destructive desire that deserves obliteration. The answer is not to retreat into the hermitage of one’s house for a “staycation.” Humans have always gone outward to seek excitement — it’s just a question of where and by what means. Travel tells you to seek excitement by getting away and spending money.
I’ve lived in Omaha my entire life. I call home a triple-landlocked state of rolling prairies. It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve seen mountains or an ocean. For the majority of my time as a Nebraska resident, I’ve complained about how dull and boring the region is, always wanting to travel more than the occasional family getaway to a wedding or conference.
But a few weeks ago, I found myself accosted by a new and alarmingly wholesome perspective on my supposedly uninteresting life in the great plains. With it, I found my desire for more travel suddenly lacking, and came to understand that this exact perspective, though I’d never realized it, had been prodding my mind for years. I realized simple excitement helped me combat the times my life felt too tiring, and simply tiring myself helped me combat the times my life felt unexciting. I could satisfy the desire for travel by resting and investing in home.
An exciting life ceases to be tiring. There are plenty of old proverbs about how there’s beauty and excitement everywhere for those with eyes to see. I used to not believe them. As it turns out, they’re completely true.
West Omaha’s endless suburban neighborhoods were depressingly repetitive to me until 2023, when I saw them for the first time from 60 feet up in a tree almost every day over the course of a summer, working 11-hour days in arboriculture. It was the most exhausting work I’d ever done and nonetheless absolutely riveting.
Likewise, the low, rolling prairies of Nebraska were nothing if not boring until this previous spring break, when I saw them from a 20-minute drive away. Having completed a grueling bike ride up the bluffs that overlook a vast portion of the Missouri River Valley, I could see my entire home city, making out literal hundreds of square miles.
Baw Beese Lake was never fun until this fall, when I pushed a fellow Simpson resident from one shore clear across to the other in a boat made from a cardboard box and tape. Excitement is waiting everywhere in creation. When found, tiring tasks become exhilarating.
Just as importantly, a tiring life becomes exciting in its own respect. Almost everyone knows the thrill of accomplishment after successfully juggling a jam-packed schedule. Everyone knows the quality of rest which follows these victories, and the subsequent mellow feeling when we realize there’s no more challenges left to conquer.
Like the excitement of creation, these kinds of wonderfully draining tasks often come from outside the self. For the younger me, this was juggling sports and school, something plenty of Hillsdale students do. Volunteering, as many other Hillsdale students know, is another perfect example. In my experience, I spent much of high school swamped with church and church-related volunteering as well as volunteering with children — and I loved it all. And for my entire family, tiring excitement means 20 years of home and garden improvement: tile, drywall, plumbing, paint, sod, mulch, trees and all, with plenty of car maintenance on the side.
The door to travel will always be open in its proper time and place when it’s inevitably necessary — that’s what makes it so enjoyable — but the desire for more is a misguided one. That time and money, rest and investment, is better spent at home in the humble disciplines of wonder and work, loving creation and community. And when the time and place is right for travel, that kind of contentment allows its possessor to appreciate new places and experiences for what they are, instead of what home is not.
Lewis Thune is a junior studying politics.
