Go to Someplace You've Never Been

Go to Someplace You've Never Been

By Richard Bangs

"Once a year, go someplace you've never been before."

It's a divine piece of guidance, often attributed to the Dalai Lama, and one I've tried to live by since my teens. There's a particular kind of magic that awakens when we step beyond the perimeter of the familiar, a childlike wonder that arises with every new horizon, every foreign scent, every untraveled path. My own compass, it seems, was magnetized early.

In 1973, I picked up a book, Eyelids of Morning: The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men, by Alistair Graham, with more than 200 haunting photographs by Peter Beard. It was a graphic account of an expedition to Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana) in Kenya, the terminus of the Omo River that coils like an ancient serpent from the Ethiopian highlands. I fell headlong into the imagery of the book, as though it had thrown open a portal to a dimension geographically distant and hypnotic in its otherness. I vowed to go. A few weeks later, with barely more than a notion and a map, I was rowing a raft down the Omo River, a first descent. That trip became the foundational offering of the adventure travel company I co-founded, Sobek, built on the principle of venturing into the uncharted and inviting travellers to taste the adrenaline of fast waters and the serenity of untouched wilderness.

For three weeks, we navigated the untried flows of the Omo. We read the river's moods through the blades of our oars, dodged hundreds of hippos and crocodiles, forged friendships with Mursi tribespeople, and passed through a world largely unbroken by time. But a rather inconvenient lack of sustenance towards the end forced us to exit the river just short of the Kenya border and the blue-green saline waters of Turkana. It was a journey unfinished in geography, but not in spirit. The call of the lake so powerfully painted in Beard's photography remained just out of reach, a tantalizing ellipsis at the end of that OG adventure.

It was, more importantly, the first chapter in a lifelong philosophy: go where you haven't gone, even, perhaps especially, if it scares you.

Why is this important? Because the unfamiliar reshapes us. Each new place is a mirror, not just of another culture, climate, or cuisine, but of ourselves. How we react, adapt, and evolve in the face of difference. When we go someplace new, we momentarily shred the scripts of our daily lives and become explorers again, not just of the outer world, but of the inner terrain that often lies dormant in the starch of the commonplace. I've seen it happen time and again, in myself and in those I've guided.

There's a moment when the eyes widen, the breath slows, and the face relaxes into wonder.

The petty concerns of daily life, the bills, the office politics, the social media scroll, fall away, replaced by an acute awareness of the present moment. Studies have shown that novel experiences trigger the release of dopamine, improving mood while enhancing learning capacity and creativity.

Going someplace you've never been doesn't always require an expedition down a remote African river. It can be a sunlit alleyway in Porto where the soulful notes of fado drift from an open window. It can be the windswept steppe of Kazakhstan or the quiet majesty of Bhutan, where prayer flags flutter like whispers across Himalayan ridges.

The destination matters less than the disruption, the cracking open of the personal snow globe to let the real world, and your real self, spill out. New places inject the soul with stories. Each journey becomes a thread in the patchwork quilt of a well-lived life.

And over time, you look back not on a life of neatly folded calendars and emails answered, but on moments: the time you slept under savannah stars; the minute you witnessed the unblinking eyes of a crocodile rise from the African currents; the afternoon you shared mint tea with a Tajikistani herder who spoke no English, and yet spoke volumes.

So, once a year, go someplace you've never been. Mark your calendar not with deadlines, but with departures.

I follow that formula, and am going forth to visit Lake Turkana this fall on a customized Kenya walking safari, finally completing the Omo journey I began so long ago. If you can, come join us.

Life isn't meant to be a static exercise. It's meant to be a dynamic dance with the unknown.

Go forth with open eyes and a big heart, and allow the world to write its story upon you.

Visit www.richardbangs.com for more...