You feel it every day.

The call of the ocean at the edge of the world — the whispered invitation of foreign cities and landscapes in your dreams both day and night.

For thousands of years, we, as a species, have journeyed across strange, new lands in search of something, well — more.

More land. More people. More opportunity. More.

And thousands of years later, you feel that same itch.

The itch that makes you antsy and restless, and urges you to move.

You boil your wanderlust down to “needing a vacation,” but it’s so much more than that.

Because travel isn’t just a series of bucket lists, and pin boards, and “somedays.”

It’s part of your DNA.

Flytographer: Bayu in Bali

Flytographer: Marta in Venice

Flytographer: Gaia in Genoa

Breaking from the norm

We all grind.

Whether you’ve got 16-hour days, a 7 day work week, or you’re always on the go with your kids, finding that optimal work-life balance is easier said than done.

The 40-hour work week and a slew of cultural and societal norms have gone a long way to shaping us into creatures of habit and routine, and we sure do love our routines. They keep us organized, they keep us focused, and they keep us productive.

But that doesn’t mean we should stick to the same schedules day after day with next to no reprieve — we’d go mad.

Yes, travel will help you refresh, relax, and reset — not simply because you spent the week lounging around the beach, but because it’s the furthest thing imaginable from your daily life.

You wake up at a different hour, you eat different foods, you wear different clothes, and you experience and enjoy life from a different perspective you could never get from the confines of your highly itinerized life, because all habits — even the best ones — need to be broken every now and then.

Flytographer: Claudia in Lisbon

Quelling our curiosity

We’re curious cats, and the need to see, and do, and touch, and explore pulls at our very core every single day.

We feel it when we instinctively lean in to smell a beautiful bouquet of flowers, and when we reach out and touch items on display as we browse the aisles of a store. When we spend our days scrolling through news feeds and articles to see how others live, and wonder how their lives can be so different from ours, from street to street, city to city, and country to country.

We can, on occasion, show timidity, but our desires to dive into new adventures that will take us far away from what we’ve grown accustomed to will always win out in the end, because like animals, our curiosity tends to get the best of us — and we should pride ourselves on tuning into our instincts.

Flytographer: Kimon in Santorini

Broadening our horizons

It’s pretty hard — if not entirely impossible — to stop learning.

For those of us who love to learn, we’re always looking to immerse ourselves new experiences and information, whether that’s learning a language, trying new foods, or experiencing the world from a different perspective — whatever we can do to enrich our lives on the regular.

Travel is the most accessible way for us to scratch that particular itch, because we can learn things we might never be exposed to from the creature comforts of our day-to-day.

Through travel, we’re humbled by witnessing landscapes and monuments, and learning of histories that are are so much larger than ourselves, and by allowing ourselves to feel tiny, we open our minds to an entire world of possibilities.

We all experience the inherent pull to surround ourselves with new people, sights, and experiences, because our desire to travel lies much deeper than the superficial idea of “needing a vacation.”

Travel is a call — an instinct.

It is at once a dive into what is foreign and new, yet simultaneously, our wanderlust is the anchor that grounds us and connects us to one another.