We may acquire a lot of knowledge from books and act like the smartest person in the world, yet the one who has experienced the world through their eyes, out in the open, will always be a step ahead. Open maps in the four-walled rooms will not teach us what the world really looks like.
When I was studying in England, I asked one of my friends (who was also my classmate) which places I can visit nearby. Since she was a native of that place, I thought it would be nice to ask her. She laughed and told me that she hasn’t visited a lot of places and it would be terrible for her to suggest something. Despite this, she took out the magazine she was carrying in her bag and started turning the pages for the travel section in it. Four out of five places she suggested to me were already familiar to me as I had already visited those places. Though she shared some good information with me from the magazine, I was able to tell her about those places more than she thought as I had visited those places myself.
Most of us love reading maps and closely watching and understanding countries, their borders, geography, people, etc. We read books that give us immense knowledge of the world around us but that knowledge is never enough to understand what this world really looks like.
Maps, very neatly, present the borders between countries in the Atlas, but are these boundaries as vivid and smooth as they appear in books? I believe not. Some borders are peaceful while others are places of conflict that are a result of rivalries between countries or peoples, disputes over national resources, or disagreements about the past.
This phrase is not unfamiliar to us — “I’ve read about it in a book, but I’m not sure how to do it”. Clearly, a book can tell us about a lot of things, but it cannot teach us how exactly to do those things. Only life teaches you things — about the world around you and in front of you.
Don’t restrict yourself
To the number of pages
Of the books that you read
For a long time and ages
Go out in the open
Go out in the breeze
Climb the tallest mountains
And experience the freeze
The maps may draw the boundaries
Of countries, states and towns
No such lines exist in real
We’re all one, somewhere deep down
Deep down our hearts
We are people made of love and dust
No blurred boundaries stop us
From understanding what we must
I believe that the world does not live in maps or books, but it is right there in the open. Books can often be just a collection of papers, but life is a collection of learning, knowing, understanding, experiencing, and exploring. Anyone can repeat theory, but experience and exploration teach us what we truly need to understand.
Travelling gives us exposure to other cultures. If an individual has remained in their home time for their entire life, it would make it hard for them to completely understand the struggles and celebrations of other regions and countries. One culture can be vastly different from the other. Visiting different cultures and interacting with diverse communities breaks our preconceived notions and assumptions about other cultures and people. You may like to read this blog: Travelling Leads to a Happy Ending of Cultural Biases. Does It?
Books cannot be the ‘only’ way for learning about new things, places, cultures, and people. We need to step outside the boundaries of the pages of our books and look for the world that is out in the open. J.R.R. Tolkien has rightly said — “The world is not in your books and maps, it is out there”.
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