Keeping our hearts open is a daring choice, especially when the world feels heavy, uncertain, and scary. The courage to live and feel joy is the bravest act.
I’m back in the country of my birth, El Salvador. I’m walking and driving through the landscapes that shaped my earliest memories. My mom died three years ago in January, and I miss her so much that it still aches in a way words can barely express. I created the El Salvador Gastronomad Experience to honor her, because I know how deeply she cherished her homeland and how alive she felt here.
Her death, as all deaths do, reminds me of our fragile mortality, of everyone I love, and of my own brief time on this beautiful planet. Thinking about mortality makes me deeply sad. Yet it fills me with fierce gratitude for my life and gives me the courage and inspiration to savor life as fully and honestly as possible.
This is why I’ve decided to bring back the El Salvador Gastronomad Experience. It was painful to remove it. I’ve realized that honoring my mom, my love for her, and for my native land is not only right, but necessary. And it’s a genuine path through the grief that still fills my heart.
In the last few months, a few dear friends have expressed some fear of, and guilt about, travel. They’re not sure it’s OK to seek beauty and wonder for themselves, while the world is so full of pain and conflict. Their words resonated with me because I recognized that feeling immediately.
Many of us carry that conflict inside us. The part that longs for joy and the part that worries that joy is selfish and wrong because it’s denied to others.
Witnessing the world can weigh heavily on the heart. We feel the suffering and chaos. We begin to question ourselves and wonder if joy is a luxury, if happiness is inappropriate when so much feels fractured and precarious. It’s an understandable doubt, and a selfless act of compassion and empathy, but it’s not the whole story.
Despite worries about turmoil and geopolitical storms, life is a privilege too precious to surrender by confining ourselves to serve penance. Negative voices urge us to dim our light right when we need it most.
So much of the fear and angst we feel is caused by a small number of people: selfish, narcissistic, callous, power-hungry people causing pain for their own benefit.
What should our response be? Do we voluntarily sacrifice our own happiness, adding to the list of things they’ve ruined? Or do we refuse?
Instead of succumbing to fear and guilt, I think we must live a full and adventurous life, regardless. And while doing so, we can also make a difference.
If we’re worried about the global environment, we can experience and support people in the world practicing sustainable agriculture.
If we’re stressed about xenophobia, racism, and division, we can visit far-flung places and sit down to break bread with people in other places and share our stories and cultures.
If we’re stressed about the overwhelming prevalence of industrial food, we can enjoy and support natural, traditional and sustainable agriculture.
Our actions must come from our own values and lived truths, not those of others.
It’s a miracle of our humanity that among over 8 billion people on this planet, each of us is entirely unique. We’re not here to twist ourselves into shapes that make others comfortable, nor to carry shame or guilt because someone else insists we adopt their views.
We’re fortunate that we can also find bountiful comfort in knowing that the world is full of kindred spirits who uplift and inspire us, people whose presence brightens our path like a ray of sunlight streaming through a window at sunrise. Despite voices trying to scare or shame us, attempting to drown our joy and happiness with their own fears and rigid beliefs, there are many others who gently encourage us, support us, to be fully ourselves.
Travel is the greatest way to experience the world and discover the true beauty of its amazing people, rich cultures, magnificent architecture, and incredible landscapes.
Travel teaches me that joy isn’t a betrayal of pain. It’s the medicine that helps us endure it.
Joy, like empathy, is something we must practice. We become what we practice. If we practice fear, fear takes hold of us. If we foster anger, we stay angry. But if we cultivate gratitude, joy, and openness, they flourish within us. We become fluent in whatever we rehearse, so let’s rehearse gratitude, love, play, delight, and the everyday miracle of simply being alive.
The small, shining moments; a simple act of kindness, a stranger’s smile, a familiar voice that brings us comfort, the clinking of glasses at a shared table, the everyday sounds of life continuing to echo in every corner of the world are not escapes from reality. They are the heartbeat of humanity and proof of what remains good, and worth protecting, and celebrating.
The people we meet on our journeys: farmers, chefs, artisans, drivers, and fellow wanderers, remind me that we are one human family. Through their generosity, courage, passion, humility, and dignity, I learn that happiness is not frivolous; beyond our right, it’s our rebellion against despair and darkness.
When we gather around the table, each shared story, each shared meal, each shared laugh becomes a small act of resistance against hopelessness.
Life’s brevity is its clearest lesson: there’s no “later” we can truly count on. Life is fragile and fleeting. None of us know how long our journey will be, so let’s not waste our precious moments on guilt, fear or anger.
The time to savor, explore, connect, and learn from the world’s people and places is now. You deserve happiness.
To those with a heavy heart: travel anyway. Love anyway. Feel everything anyway. Celebrate life anyway. Be the human you want others to be. Do what brings you joy. Life is about finding joy in the experience of living. We honor life by living it fully and bravely.
The world doesn’t need us to dim our light out of guilt or fear; it needs us to keep it shining brightly for ourselves and each other. This is the deepest reason to keep saying yes to joy and to keep practicing the brave act of living fully, with grace and gumption, and with love and respect for one another.
With love, gratitude, grace, and gumption,
Amira
