On Compassion, Curiosity, and the Radical Act of Showing Up Somewhere Unfamiliar

How movement creates empathy and why that has never mattered more

I almost didn’t write this.

Not because the ideas aren’t clear to me, they have been forming for years. Sharpened by every border crossing, every meal eaten in a language I didn’t speak, every moment I sat across from someone whose life looked nothing like mine and felt the particular humility of realizing I have been wrong about something without ever knowing I believed it.

I almost didn’t write it because I’ve started it before. Every attempt ended before it began. Not from fear of criticism, but from something harder to name. A deep awareness that what I think and feel today may not be what I believe tomorrow. That my opinions evolve, my perspectives shift, and the more I see of the world, the less certain I become about the things I once held as fixed.

In a world drowning in opinions presented as facts, I needed to figure out how to share my experiences honestly. Not as truth. Not as authority. But as a snapshot. A glimpse into how I see things at this particular moment, from this particular vantage point.

That’s all any of us can offer, really.

We spend a lot of time in travel content talking about where to go, what to eat, which hotel has the best infinity pool. We talk almost never about what travel actually does to a person when it’s working the way it’s supposed to.

Perspective is something we talk about far too little. We treat it as a destination, something you either have or you don’t. But it’s not. It’s a practice. It’s the ongoing sometimes uncomfortable work of holding your own experience lightly enough to let someone else’s land.

I’ve been moving through places that look nothing like where I grew up for two decades now. Markets in Marrakech, local artisans in Indonesia, sailing the Adriatic, and a hundred small moments in between. Each of those experiences did something to the edges of what I thought I knew. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Quietly, incrementally, the way water reshapes stone, so slowly you don’t notice until you look back and realize the shape has changed entirely.

That is what travel does when you when you lead with curiosity rather than a checklist. Let it.

Here is something I have come to believe completely:

Take a group of people from different backgrounds, different socioeconomic realities, different cultures. Put them in the same room, for the same amount of time, talking to the same people, eating the same food, hearing the same music. Every single one of them will walk away with a different experience.

None of them are right. None of them are wrong.

Each has drawn their understanding from everything they know – and everything they don’t. Their history, their fears, their reference points, the stories they were told growing up about places and people that looked like what they are now standing in front of. All of it filters the same moment into something entirely their own.

I find this endlessly fascinating and also frustrating. What if, instead of judging the distance between those perspectives, we got curious about it? What if we asked why someone’s experience of the same moment was so different from our own, and actually listened to the answer?

That question is at the heart of everything I want to do here.

I work in the hospitality industry. I have for twenty years. I know what a good thread count feels like, and I know which properties deliver on their promise and which ones are selling a fantasy. I am not naïve about the role that access and privilege play in the kind of travel I write about.

But I’ve come to believe that real luxury, the kind that stays with you, the kind that changes something, isn’t a thread count. It’s having your assumptions quietly dismantled by a place you didn’t expect to move you, and the people you didn’t arrange to meet.

The most luxurious moments of my traveling life have not been the finest hotels, though some of those have been extraordinary. They have been the unexpected ones. The afternoon on Nusa Penida when our boat broke down and we stumbled into a small dive resort and spent three hours talking to a server who was saving money to leave the island for the first time at thirty years old. The call to prayer echoing through the medina in Marrakech at sundown as the city became still. The dinner on a remote Croatian island where a kind couple fed us their fresh catch of the day and poured wine they had made themselves, the kind of evening that only happens when you stop looking for it.

Those moments cost nothing extra. They required only the willingness to be present to something outside the itinerary.

Why this matters right now? I am not a political writer, and I don’t intend to ever become one. But I would be dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that the reason I feel the urgency about this particular project, at this particular moment, is that the world feels less curious about itself than it did even ten years ago.

Fear of the unfamiliar is not new. But it has found a new amplification. And I watch it produce what you would expect – resentment, suspicion, the hardening of positions to what people want them to be. Anger directed at people and places that, if you actually went there, actually sat with someone, actually ate the food and heard the music and watched how people move through their days, you would likely find almost impossible to hate.

I’ve come to believe that the more the world genuinely understands one another – not tolerates, not coexist with, but truly understands - the greater the chance that compassion crowds out ignorance. That’s not a naïve idea. It’s actually the only one that makes sense to me after moving through places that look nothing like where I grew up.

Travel is not the only path to that understanding. But it is one of the most effective ones available to those of us lucky enough to have access to it. That luck comes with a responsibility to pay attention and to share what I notice.

I am not an expert. I am flawed in more ways than I’d care to list. I have a raw sense of humor and an adventurous spirit that some people find refreshing, and others find to be a lot, and I’ve made peace with both.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel extensively, to sit at tables I have never expected to sit at, to hear stories I never would have encountered had I stayed within the comfortable radius of what I already knew. I’ve also been wrong about places before I arrived and had to quietly revise everything I thought I knew once I got there. That process of revision is not embarrassing to me, it is the whole point.

What I think and feel today may not be what I believe tomorrow. My opinions evolve, my perspectives shift, and the more I see of the world, the less certain I become about the things I once knew. I write from this vantage point, at this particular moment, with everything I currently know and all the things I don’t yet.

The question is whether we’re willing to keep showing up anyway – to the unfamiliar place, the uncomfortable conversation, the moment that asks us to hold our own experience lightly enough to let someone else’s land.

I am. That’s why I’m here.

If this resonates, please subscribe and join our community. If you have a moment where travel rearranged something you thought you knew, I'd genuinely like to hear about it in the comments.