The World Doesn't Explain Itself

Travel doesn’t automatically make you more open-minded, and knowledge doesn't automatically make you aware

I’ve always loved the idea that the world is far bigger than the version of it we grow up with.

A world that has different ways of living, thinking, eating, moving, believing. Entire worlds existing alongside one another, shaped by geography, culture, conflict, ancestry, and time. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn toward that feeling of stepping outside of what is familiar and realizing how much more there is to understand.

My mum held a firm household philosophy: never judge someone until you know exactly what they’ve been through. Simple advice, until you realize how genuinely difficult it is to live up to. But it shapes the way you approach the world. Likewise, she also made certain one thing: we were aware of the world beyond our doorstep. Whatever our financial situation at any given time, she made sure we were exposed to it, curious about it, and present in it as much as she could manage. I can chalk much of my curiosity and admiration for the world and cultures and interactions to this — something modelled before to me before I could explain it.

It’s a core piece of the person I’ve grown into, and I went on to study international relations (IR) formally because of it. IR felt like the closest formal language for something I’d already cared about my whole life. There’s a thrill in the history of how the world. I loved it — I still do. Love it in the way that makes you stay up too late reading about things nobody asked you to read. I love tracing a conflict back to its roots and realizing how deep they go. Watching the puzzle pieces of the world snap into place and seeing that nothing, no border, no alliance, no war, happened by accident.

What draws me to IR is the way it insists that the world has a shape — that the current events is actually the product of forces and decisions and histories, and that underneath the chaos, there is structure. And that structure matters enormously for real people living real lives.

And then there is travel. Which is something else entirely, but also stems from exactly the same thing.

I desire to see the world but not just in a collect-the-countries way. In the way my mum first showed me: that the world is something to be present in. To be standing somewhere and feeling how its history lives in the present tense. Travel, at its best, is the experience of realizing that the story you were told about a place was only ever one version of it.

Travel doesn’t automatically make you more open-minded. That’s the romantic version. You can travel extensively and return home more confirmed in everything you already believed because we are remarkably good at finding evidence for what we came looking for. My mum’s rule holds here too: you never know exactly what someone has been through. You never fully will, and it’s the reason to keep going, and to go more aware and humbly.

And IR doesn’t automatically make you more aware. You can study the architecture of the world and still reduce living, breathing places to case studies. Or understand the forces at play without ever genuinely reckoning with what it feels like to be caught inside them. The framework is only as good as the humility you bring to it.

The gap between the official story of a place and the one of those who live it is two entirely different things, but have lines tying it all together. IR can tell you that a border was drawn arbitrarily, that a colonial administration divided a region, and that the consequences of that decision are still reverberating today. But standing near that border — watching how it functions, who it impacts, what it costs — turns the analytical into the visceral. The knowing becomes feeling. And the feeling sends you back to the knowing with better questions than you started with.

The two sharpen each other in ways I didn’t expect when I first fell in love with each of them separately. Together they do something neither can do alone.

The lines on maps are not neutral. They are the residue of power, of conflict, of the slow accumulation of choices that eventually hardened into simply the way things are. And when you travel with that understanding in mind, the world stops being a collection of destinations.

So much of my passion for seeing the world is not in just seeing it with my eyes, but in the eyes of many. To take both the geopolitical and the human seriously — not as separate concerns, but as the same concern looked at from different angles. To travel with purpose and think with curiosity and be honest about what that actually produces, which is usually more questions than answers.

We live in a world that rewards confident takes and punishes uncertainty, flattening complex histories into digestible narratives and equates familiarity with understanding. It dangerous how easy it makes it to accept the shape of the world without ever asking why and at what expense. In reality, every line, whether on paper or between peoples, carries a tangled and complex story inside it. As you see that, the world stops being a collection of places to visit or headlines to follow.

The world doesn’t explain itself. It requires us to simultaneously think analytically and feel empathetically to understand it. It’s what IR taught me analytically and what travel teaches me personally, over and over again. It is the hardest and most necessary thing we can practice. And it begins with the simple, endless commitment to keep asking analytically, empathetically, and with a genuine willingness to be changed by what you find.

Welcome to Lines of Place, where the intersection of analytics and experience lives. I’m glad you’re here.

source: pinterest

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