Should You Travel Right Now? COVID-19

Originally posted on Mar 12, 2020 on medium.com/@shamandao

Sure, if you can afford to

And I am not referring to your precious travel budget, but your entire savings. Can you afford to be on lockdown for two days, two weeks past your vacation time date? Can you afford to be in a different country when there’s been a travel ban implemented in the country you’re in?

For many, a cheap plane ticket and slashed hotel deals are as shiny as the disco balls in a Las Vegas night club. They pull you in and next thing you know, you’re walking out at sunrise with your heels in hand, your eyeliner smeared and your lips chapped from making out with a stranger all night thinking, what the hell just happened?

Risk versus reward:

There’s always a consequence to any action. There is an effect to all causes and there should be times when you weigh the risk versus reward. But how many do? Seriously, look around you. How many people do you personally know weigh out the risks versus rewards? If you are surrounded by them, then kudos because the majority of the world right now are in groups of one of two.

Should I travel because the prices are so cheap? Or the other group who needs more toilet paper.

My niece asked me on our last video chat, “Should I buy tickets for a trip in August? I mean I don’t think it’s a big deal. People are making it out bigger than it is, honestly. The tickets are cheap too,” she said.

Before I answered her, I thought of a meme circulating at the moment of the picture of a millennial in latex gloves, a face mask, sunglasses on the plane with caption of, Me on my $43 flight to my $20/night 5-day coronavaction.

Maybe some of these millennials do have the funds to stay in a foreign country for weeks past their allotted two-week vacation period, who knows. But for the rest?

Reward all day, without even second-guessing the risk. I answered my niece the same thing I started this article with, “Yeah, go ahead. If you can afford it.”

She reiterated how cheap the flights were and how she’d be staying at a friend’s house. As I asked if she could afford extra days or weeks to be in a country that placed travel bans while she was in the country, I saw something happen.

I could sense and see that beautiful millennial brain of hers begin to churn. She thought about the risk versus reward and began asking herself these questions of Could she afford to stay for longer? What about her job? What would happen then?

She decided not to buy the tickets.

Some of us may associate the word, ‘afford,’ with our finances at hand but what really can we afford? Can we afford to run down our body and health to get sick if we’re the breadwinners in the household? Can we afford those extra calories if our bodybuilding competition is coming up? Can we afford to put our kids in the same classroom as the other illness covered munchkins that run amuck every single day? Can we afford to travel from our homes and be okay with being stuck in another state or foreign country? Or worse, catching a virus and bringing it back home to the ones we love?

The careless actions of humans have gravely endangered our world and planet by the fast consumerism and consumption of now, now, now, need, need, need. Do you know where your trash goes? Do you know the waste that comes from ordering Amazon Prime EVERY SINGLE DAY? Where do you stand in this massive chain?

I, too, once was very unconscious and a fly by the seat of my pants decision-maker. I didn’t care about the consequences of my actions or how it impacted the environment and then slowly something happened. It was as if I woke up from a thirty-something year coma. With every blink of my eyes, I began to see the world from a different perspective.

I began to shift into a conscious state of being.

As what is currently happening in our world was not an overnight effect, as long as we begin to shift our ways and our perceptions, as a whole we may be able to shift our world.

Start small. Start now. Begin making conscious decisions by asking yourself before you make your next purchase,

“How is this purchase going to impact my life and our world?

“What consequences are involved?”

“Am I adding or taking away from a person, place or thing?”

“Can I afford this karma to boomerang back to me?”

Ask yourself, could you?

Blessed be.