The Why Traveler

Author Taiye Selasi invites us to travel not for distance but for depth. To move as explorers, not tourists, and to rediscover both the world and ourselves by trading control for curiosity.

Taiye Selasi has plants everywhere. You get the feeling of a place that was assembled for receiving after a life of so much movement. She says it’s her “jungle,” and it fits. For someone who’s lived in Accra, New York, Rome, Berlin, and now Lisbon, belonging is no longer a pin on a map, it’s a texture, a relationship, a way of paying attention.

Because years ago, Taiye offered a way out of the worn-out “Where are you from?” trap with an idea that traveled almost as widely as she did:

“Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local.”

The line (and the TED talk that carried it around the world) landed because it gave people the permission to define home by lived experience, rather than by lineage or passport.

“If that answer hadn’t evolved over time, I’d be doing something wrong,” she tells me now, laughing.

This is a conversation about why we move. Not to arrive, not to be worldly, but to wake up to the world again. And perhaps to become someone capable of truly connecting with our surroundings.

Early in our talk, Taiye makes a distinction that clarifies everything that follows. There’s the traveler, and there’s the explorer. The traveler, she suggests, often carries a fixed self from airport to airport. Think of it as logistics more than encounter. The explorer however, arrives with “beginner’s mind.” They’re porous, curious, and adaptable. Because the explorer’s goal isn’t to cover ground, it’s to be moved by it.

“Everywhere I go, even if I’ve been there before, I try to choose a beginner's mind,” she says. “Maximum curiosity, maximum flexibility, maximum openness.”

In this sense, exploration becomes a beautiful ritual. Because it’s no longer about borders crossed, but a decision to act as if seeing a piece of the world for the first time. That decision changes things. It alters what you notice, how you listen, how you speak to the person pouring you coffee or showing you the way through an unfamiliar area. In other words, it turns place into practice.

Then what does it mean to be a local? For Taiye it’s relational rather than geographic. She recalls a young man who studied in Canada for five years and later wondered if he “earned” the right to call himself a local. “Of course,” she told him. The point is not how long you were there, it’s what happened between you and the place while you were. We talk about Berlin and Lisbon, two cities she lived in for similar stretches. She never felt like a local of the former, though she tried. But with Lisbon, the relationship took off. She lists other cities like Accra, Rome, New York where locality has settled into her as a kind of inner music. The lesson is both intentional and beautiful: locality isn’t earned by duration, it’s cultivated by depth.

So why move at all? Why leave a nest you’ve carefully created? Taiye offers a line that seems to inform her way of moving through the world: “Man understands himself best in estrangement.” The sentiment, which she attributes to Nietzsche, is the anchor of her why. When we feel a little foreign to ourselves, when our habits feel dislodged, we see more. We’re more alert, we’re open.

She mentions that estrangement doesn’t require large distances. People can feel foreign within their nuclear families, others in the towns where they’re born. But willful foreignness, the decision to see yourself as an outsider or abandon the comfort of categories, does something precise to the mind. It heightens openness, loosens control, and increases self-awareness. It’s the more fulfilling act underneath the itinerary.

Still, the freedom to choose movement is often born from the movements we didn’t choose. For instance, the ones our families made for us.

In Taiye’s view, movement begins as inheritance and later becomes intention. Her parents’ journeys were part of her passive biography. But her own decisions to move and to live between continents belong to her active one. “At a certain point, life becomes yours to direct,” she says. “I’d already done a lot of moving because of forces beyond my control, which is a gift, it means I know how to do it.” Movement, she suggests, doesn’t just change where we are, it changes how we’re seen. And with that comes the question every traveler eventually faces: What does it mean to belong at all?

Our conversation drifts to the need people have to categorize—to ask who belongs and who doesn’t. Selasi doesn’t scold the impulse. “It’s in our nature,” she says. “Early humans needed to know if someone was for us or against us. It was protective.” The problem, she explains, is not the instinct itself but how it’s been distorted:

“If we define ‘us’ as people who share values, rituals, or commitments to a place, we can build connection. If we define ‘us’ by what separates us, we shrink our humanity.”

Travel, in that sense, becomes an act of reunion. An invitation to remember how much we already share.

“What has travel taught you about being still?” I ask. She smiles. “That stillness isn’t a noun, it’s a verb.”

To still oneself, she explains, is an act, and a choice that’s available anywhere. In a taxi line, at a departure gate, in a living room full of morning light. “You don’t have to be in a beautiful or inspiring place to practice stilling yourself,” she says. “You just have to decide.”

In this way, stillness and travel share the same intention: to pay deeper attention to the present moment. One moves the body, the other moves the mind. Both are ways of beginning again no matter where we are. Awareness, after all, means little without practice. Selasi’s advice for travelers is wonderfully practical, almost like a field manual for being awake wherever you are:

- Ask for directions. Even if you know the way. The point is not to be informed but to make contact. That small exchange of your question and their kindness is the easiest bridge between two worlds.

- Chin up, phone down. Walk for ten minutes without looking at a screen. Make eye contact. “Let your humanity be in discourse with the place,” she says.

- Learn a few words. A hello, a thank-you, a goodbye. Language lowers borders.

- Leave room for the unknown. Research is useful until it turns into control. “We try to know everything before we get there,” she warns, “and in doing so, we shrink the magic of discovery.”

Each of these gestures reclaims curiosity from consumption. They turn travel from an act of having, into an act of being. And what these gestures reveal, she says, is that curiosity isn’t a mood but a method.

Taiye distinguishes between two kinds of curiosity. First, there’s “pre-curiosity,” the kind that looks like research but is really about control. “The internet gives us the illusion of mastery,” she says. “But the explorer has to let go.” In contrast, for her, true curiosity begins once you’ve arrived. It’s when the map gives way to the street or when you take the turn you didn’t plan. “The explorer,” she says, “is willing to cede control to maximize curiosity. The traveler is not.”

There’s a moment, sometimes, when a new place feels strangely known. Like some recognition you can’t quite name. What do you do with that? “Ask yourself,” she says, “if I lived here, what might I be doing today?” The answer doesn’t have to be extravagant. Maybe you’d be buying bread, walking a dog, sitting to feel the sun on your face. “That’s it,” she says. “Just that one connection to the people in the place, connecting it to your humanity.

As our conversation closes, I ask what question moves her most now. She answers without hesitation:

“How can we see more of ourselves in more of everyone else?”

Perhaps that’s the whole journey, the why behind all movement. Because maybe we travel not to collect experiences, but to experience connection. Not to escape home, but to recognize it everywhere else. And perhaps true travelling is not about going the farthest, but about moving most deeply—chin lifted, phone pocketed, and fully awake to meet the world ahead.