The Magic of
*Travel Archetypes!

 What Travel Does for Me

That Is Unique to Travel
That Only Travel Allows
Me to Do

The ‘Actor’

Travel sets the stage—the world becomes my stage—upon which I can create and act out alternative ME’s, relatively free from the constraints that my ordinary, mundane more controlled, more predictable, and more restricted life at home does not normally permit me—give me free rein—to do.

And why is that?

At home my sociological, psychological, and cultural matrix defines my bubble, my envelope, and my boundary down to the most re-stricted, the most constrained interpretation of my environment.

Any way you look at it, my ‘movements’ within my environmental matrix are defined, restricted, constrained in such ways that my normal, typical, everyday behaviors are as brainless and mindless, and, hence, least creative as they could be.

Everything is designed to be as thoughtless, simple, set, defined, predictive, dependable, regular and ‘automatic’ as it could be. Nothing is new, surprising, unpredictable or changed.

For order, predictability, and regularity we give up—yes—our de-grees of freedom. We pay a price for predictability, regularity, and stability in our day-to-day lives and motions—the daily activities that define our life-spaces.

But the greatest price of all, resulting from our willingness to give up our freedom, in the service of regularity, predictability, and stability in our lives, is to stifle our creativity and our personal growth.

Growing, maturing, achieving, realizing—in a word—self-actualizing—that is, becoming all that we can be—doesn’t often happen so much at home . . .

As it does through travel.

Nothing is so capacitating and enabling in our lives as travel.

In travel we shuck constraints; we speed things up; we race ahead with stimulation and experiencing. We break and expand our bub-bles, our envelopes, and our boundaries. We let in rather than close out.

Travel enables. The stage is all set with new experiences and new stimulation at every turn. We are now more free to try on new hats, new personas, new archetypes.

I have invented 14 *travel archetypes” that the ‘new,’ free-er me is eager and able to try out in my travels:

I am now the ‘traveler’ (not the simple ‘tourist’). I am also the ‘fool,’ and the ‘Superhero,’ I am much more. In travel I am much, much more than the simple ME at home.

In travel I am allowed to be:

• The Actor
• The Innocent
• The Victim
• The Adventurer
• The Lover
• The Superhero
• The Fool
• The Scoundrel
• The UFOlogist
• The Psychic
• The Gourmand
• The Collector
• The Sage
• The Cosmic Man

In travel I am free now to be the ‘Actor’ on the world stage, where I can grow and learn from all the new roles, hats, personas that I can try out in this speeded up collapsed, kaleidoscopic, microcosm that we call ‘travel.’

Oh, I stumble a bit; I trip; I fall. But I get myself right up again and begin anew. Travel is relatively safe. These are mere, light ‘bruises.’ No harm done. A little pain; a lot of gain.

The rewards for tasks, deeds, behaviors well met are immediate, instantaneous, and exhilarating.

As each new travel day becomes the first day of the rest of my ‘tra-vel life,’ I am free to become the new realized ‘ME’ that I’ll never see or become at home.

“Welcome to my (new) world!” I can now eagerly say to myself with some newfound fervor as I see in my reflection in the bathroom mir-ror or in my reflection off the Paris Bistro window as I pass on by.

Michael Brein is known as ‘The Travel Psychologist’ and resides on Bainbridge Island in Washington. For more on travel psychology go to www.michaelbrein.com.

*Travel Archetypes
(Created by Dr. Michael Brein, aka ‘The Travel Psychologist’)

More about Travel Archetypes:

Carl Gustav Jung, the famed Swiss psychoanalyst, is credited for his work on ‘archetypes,’ the basic human behavioral molds, patterns, and tendencies common to us all, which shape and in-fluence who we are and what we do. You can also think of archetypes as composite simplified personality types, e.g., per-sonas, roles, selves, or charac-teristics that define us.

Human personality is a very complicated matter, indeed, and while archetypes do not necessarily explain us, they are, ne-vertheless, a fun, interesting, entertaining, and useful—if not a bit oversimplified—way of looking at and describing our own travel selves.

Therefore, I have invented a number of travel archetypes, which should stimulate you to thinking about travel in an imaginative way. We are never simply just one of these archetypes at any one time—we are a complex mix of these as well as many other influences in our lives.