Why travel? What a broad question. There are limitless ways to approach this vague and ambiguous prompt. In a successful attempt to analyze this inquiry, an educator with nearly 20 years of English teaching experience recently held a seminar, in which I was an attendee. There are many things for me to reflect on, including the trajectory before and during the seminar, my personal performance, and most importantly what relevant conclusions to the “why travel” topic we ultimately came up with.

Approximately two days prior, all attendees were given an invariable list which included a substantial amount of quotes related to the subject of “why travel.” We were given two days to contemplate the quotes and develop relevant thoughts. I spent an adequate amount of time coming up with many notions which contribute to the main topic. On the day of the seminar, we were given two more associated readings to stimulate our contemplation even more. Two hosts were chosen, and after some time, the seminar finally begun. The hosts presented some questions one after another for us attendees to ponder about. From the beginning, it was very clear who was going to perform the greatest, two bright adolescents who had clearly speculated the quotes a lot. They commenced many different theories and reinforced other people’s concepts, and, as expected, they dominated the discussion with their sophisticated analyses and outstanding contribution. Of course, after they stated some of their thoughts and opinions, other people started to speak as well, one of which was myself, which brings us to my personal performance.

As I stated before, I spent quite some time preparing for this discussion through analyzing and contemplating the quotes, which naturally brings up the question, did I perform well? The answer to that would be I did alright. I didn’t dominate the seminar like the two attendees I mentioned previously, but my performance wasn’t mediocre, either. Besides from the fact that I provided applicable information for others to consider, I also extended and reinforced other people’s opinions. The main reason I didn’t perform outstandingly well throughout the seminar was because I wanted to hear from a more diverse selection of people and culminate my own thinking in order to expand my thoughts, which resulted in me leaving many opportunities for others to speak. This worked decently well, as more and more attendees contributed to the discussion. I only spoke if the presented theory was something I was really interested in, or if nobody spoke for an abnormally long amount of time. I’m overall satisfied with my performance, mainly because I learned a lot regarding the topic of “why travel,” despite me not expressing a lot throughout the conversations.

Whether this seminar was important or not ultimately comes down to whether or not relevant conclusions to the theme of travel were proposed. The answer to that is yes, there were indeed many valuable declarations that were accounted for throughout the discussion that most certainly relates to the main topic. One theory that was described is that one reason you should travel is because you should follow your heart, because that’s where you’ll find your treasure, initially stated in Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.” Another statement is that you can’t complete a journey if you don’t start it, all accomplishments started from one place, and that the only reason these achievements were advanced was because, at the very beginning, someone was willing to travel. Even the tiniest bit of travel is better than no travel at all, as travel always has some value and benefit. Traveling illuminates lives and opens up room for amazing opportunities, and you never know what might happen if you travel. These are just some of the crucial statements the attendees came up with throughout the seminar, which exemplifies the relevance and significance of this discussion.

In summary, this seminar that took place just a couple days ago resulted in many different subjections to the topic of “why travel.” Many people, including me, performed decently well, and with the help of each other, we further examined the obscure theme of travel, and this inspection will benefit us in the future in many different ways.

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