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Over the years, I’ve so often heard people dispense with the advice to travel the world to broaden one’s horizons. Open your mind, see how other people live, get out of your little bubble, they say. Usually with eyes half closed, as if their lids give weight to their words. But might these advisors be trapped in their own little bubbles?

I’ve certainly encouraged people to travel if they can. I like to think I’m not so obnoxious by doing so. But I probably am. Yet I tell myself I’m motivated by the Right Reasons^TM. Go while you’re young, I say, have some cool experiences while you’re heathy and free. Or, You’re getting older, go before it’s too late.

I myself didn’t travel until I was in my late 40s. My husband, Paul, is the starter pistol that sent me globe trotting. Paul’s been traveling since the late sixties when, at the age of 17, he hitchhiked to South America. To say that he learned to travel in the rough is an understatement. To this day, he claims that the best sleep he ever had was in a pile of dry pig poop. So while our travel together involves more of the comforts of maturity — like a mattress, if little else — Paul’s experiences shaped my travel ethos.

Pre-Paul I’d always had the idea that one day, if I was lucky, I’d visit a travel agent and book a trip to some exotic location. This very thought sends my hubby into peak drama as he spits upon — what he takes to be — touristy tourism.

Paul and I have had, and still have, many talks about our attitudes toward travel, both our own and others’. He can’t imagine a life without travel. I can. He looks forward to his last years of health to travel. If I never get to go again, I’m sated. Paul doesn’t view travel a luxury. I can’t believe my good fortune. And I’m ever aware of those who’ll never take wing. Paul? He blows under their wings.

We debate the benefits of travel. Paul has tempered his hold on the belief that travel opens one’s mind. But only because I pointed out that not only can one travel with a closed mind, but also travel sometimes serves one’s confirmation biases. Men are in the piazza to avoid work rather than having have been kicked out of the kitchen.

Paul poo-poos people who stay in luxury apartments because they’ll waste money and miss out on real cultural experiences. I say it’s their money to spend. And the traveler in the luxury hotel is as likely to have a beer with a local as the traveler staying at the hostel. Lay your head on the down pillow or on the goose, as you prefer.

Paul loves spending hours planning travel. He does all his own booking. Without Paul, I’d leave these details to a travel agent. I guess I have. He’s my agent.

And what if one never travels? If you can open a book, a conversation, or a webpage you’re likely to open your mind. Or at least feel open-minded. And you can travel the universe in your imagination. For free.

A man in Italy, Pepe, called me outside one night to stand beside him and wonder at the sunset. Pepe, who is poor and suffers a deformity, has toiled the land his entire life. Did I need to travel to be so humbled?

Why, then, do I advise travel?

My oldest son recently, out of the blue, resent a photo from a trip he’d taken a couple years earlier. He was riding horseback to see the pyramids. Behind him was the poverty we’d experienced when he was little. Looking through his eyes for just this moment put all of pharaoh’s riches to shame.