“I spent the whole night until 2 am packing my luggage,” said my colleague, who is travelling to Sapporo. The next morning, he said he packed until 5 am.
After months of struggles at the office, people often go on vacation. They travel to different places and feel like escaping from the real world. The intention is to relax and hopefully recharge before going back to work. Once they have decided to escape the real world, they spend a month researching the place they will visit.
Hong Kong people enjoy fewer days of annual leave from the company compared to those who work in Western countries. They can only travel a few times for a few days, so they don’t want to waste their valuable days doing nothing. Often, they squeeze every minute they can and visit as many places as possible. During the journey, they wake up at six every day, grab breakfast, and then embark on adventures until late at night.
A week later, they return to the “real world” but feel drained. Despite contradicting their initial intentions, they repeat the same pattern almost every time.
Before 2019, I travelled with 2 backpacks.
Planning too much can be stressful. It assumes that everything will stay the same as you expect. However, this is a world of uncertainty, especially when you are travelling to an unfamiliar place. Many unpredictable things can happen. Then, you become afraid that you will fail to meet your planned itinerary. Therefore, you put in extra effort to plan more, adding numerous backup plans. This creates an infinite loop.
I am not writing against planning. You can invest as much time and effort as you can in planning, but the perfect plan never exists. Uncertainty can still occur. This is not cost-effective either. Why don’t we simply have a high-level picture in our minds, ensuring that we won’t get into trouble that risks our own lives, and then embrace the uncertainty?
Travelling requires exploration. Exploration includes uncertainty. Knowing that uncertainty is bound to happen sometime, somewhere, actually makes us feel safer than overplanning. Leaving some flexibility in our plans allows us to adapt.
This weekend, I will be travelling to Osaka with my girlfriend. This time, we spent fewer days planning the journey than the previous time and intentionally left some empty time slots. We simply listed the must-visit and nice-to-visit places and connected them based on location. This made us much more relaxed, rather than spending long nights struggling to come up with backup plans and backup plans for the backup plans.