Matt Friedman – Slavery and Human Trafficking

Matt Biegala – Self Exploration and Travel Mindset

What happens in our minds when we travel on our own?

On September24, Matt Biegala came to Island School and delivered an amazing presentation for students in Year 12 about the psychology of travel.  Firstly, he talked about his own passions for travelling, and how he left his home country, against his parent’s wishes to travel the world and to discover himself. He is an adventurer, and still travels around Hong Kong with his wife.  Matt is now a counselor at St John’s, and also continues to study the psychological changes we go through when we travel.

In his talk, Matt explained that travelling is all about freedom, spontaneity, and being who you want to be. Although we face multiple difficulties during our travels, the end result is always positive because every time we travel, we will discover more about ourselves. After this period of self-exploration, we can move on to pursue the activities that engage us, and maybe even set new life goals for ourselves!

Matt then moves on to tells us how we gain our knowledge of the world. (Very similar to our TOK Classes!) He tells us that our knowledge is brought on through past experiences and our memories, and also from what we are told. However, our beliefs and our own values are sometimes clouded by someone else’s thought. Therefore, when travelling on our own, we first have to put down our “backpack” full of labels and opinions, and look at the world with a fresh new pair of eyes. We also have to think critically about the things we hear and see.   When we are willing to trust our own intuition and think independently, the world will be completely different to us – we will be seeing the world in our own perspective, will be able to think independently!

When travelling to another country, no one knows you. Therefore, everyone gains freedom through travel. We are no longer contained or controlled by anything, and we are free to do whatever we want to do. Visiting a new place would be wonderful, because the country would be completely different from our home country. Any place we travel to will have a different culture; different ideologies, and the locals may even speak a different language. Because of these differences, we are forced to integrate into the society. Through integration, we gain knowledge of many new things – we will become more open minded as we travel. Most importantly, we learn to accept the new culture we live in, and this culture becomes a part of us.

However, every journey has an ending, and when we go back home, we go back to old habits, to our old friends, to old traditions. Matt continues to explain that the end of a journey doesn’t mean that we have to become our old self. We have to take the best from the culture you travelled to and use those qualities in your own life.

At the end of his presentation, all of the Year 12s understood that the purpose of travel is to explore yourself, and become the person you want to be. After this Speaker’s Hour session, we understood that we have to think critically when travelling, and also learn from all of these wonderful experiences. I am sure that all of us came out of Speaker’s Hour with a new mindset for travelling! Hopefully we can use the things we learnt from Matt today when we go on our Quest Week Trips in November!