What An AND1 Mixtape Clip Taught Me About Traveling (Around The World)

Back in my senior year of college, I had my “wannabe baller” phase. What that meant was, I would shoot hoops almost every day, workout, and watch all the AND1 Mixtapes on a loop. (“Sauce!”) And although my hoop dreams were short-lived due to my own idiocy, I did learn one very important lesson from a video with “The Professor.” During the clip, he talked about preparing for an upcoming movie role and how he improved his skills.

“Acting,” he said, “is like a muscle: you have to build it.”

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Every week or so, I’ll stuff a good book (and maybe my laptop) into my backpack, hide my cellphone, hop on the subway, and get off somewhere random. Then, I’ll walk around, admiring the new sights, smells, and sounds, and find something to do or someone to talk to. But why on Earth would I do that? Allow me to borrow from the Professor;

“Traveling is like a muscle: you have to build it.”

For me, having the guts to explore and travel doesn’t come natural because I spent so much of my life taking the road more-traveled. In school, I always took the “right” classes, studied hard, and did the “right” extracurricular activities. Thus, it took something huge to overcome the massive inertia of my complacency — something huge like moving to Asia, which built my travel muscles like fucking crazy.

Coming back to America, however, was the equivalent of taking a race car going 190mph and throwing it into reverse.

From August 2011 to November 2013, I didn’t leave the United States once. I didn’t even leave the state of California once. Fuck. I knew that if I didn’t do something — anything! — to keep my travel muscles strong, they would’ve atrophied into oblivion; for any future trip, no matter how quick or easy, it would become damn-near impossible to find the courage to go.

So I practiced traveling. I lifted weights by taking mini-leaps of faith and exploring new areas of Los Angeles. I took different streets. I practiced going to parts of town I never went to. I knew, one day, I was going to travel again; when I did, I wanted to be ready to leave with no hesitation or fear.

Going to New York and Canada in November and June helped. So did going to Denver. (Utah, not so much.)

There’s a bit of foreshadowing with this article, but I’ll just end by saying that all those “sets and reps” to build my travel muscles all led to something. I’m glad I learned that the courage to travel is something you can build and that I took the time to do so. I just made the leap a helluva lot easier.