A Love Letter to the World (From a Xenophile)

There is a heaviness in the world right now. It feels like every single headline is weighted down with some form of dread. It's also felt in the quiet hesitations. In the loud, emboldened rhetoric that once whispered from the margins and now stands, unapologetically, in the center. Bigotry. Homophobia. Racism. Misogyny. These are not new forces, but they are resurging in ways that feel like relentless assaults that are being alarmingly normalized.

So in this moment, as I type away here in my humble office, in the dead of night, I find myself craving a return to humanity. Not necessarily mine, but everyone else's!

I am a xenophile. A genuine lover of people. Of cultures. Of the unfamiliar. Of the beautifully different ways we exist, express, celebrate, mourn, eat, love, and belong.

And I believe, wholeheartedly, that travel, when done with intention, can be one of the most powerful antidotes we have to fear.

Exploring Salvador, Brazil

Let’s talk about that fear.

Because that’s what all of this comes down to, right? I wholeheartedly believe fear is at the root of exclusion. It's the fear of what we don’t understand. The fear of losing power (for those who allow it to grip you). Fear of being “othered” before we can do the othering. Fear that someone else’s existence somehow diminishes our own.

Fear is insidious because it disguises itself as protection. It tells us we are preserving something: our identity, our culture, our values, when in reality, we are shrinking. Contracting. Building walls where there should be bridges. And when fear goes unexamined, it becomes something more dangerous. It becomes justification. For cruelty, for silence, for turning the other cheek. Sure, fear can be a powerful and very necessary human instinct, but unchecked and unchallenged, it becomes the soil in which hate germinates. As a black woman, I've been on the other side of that fear. I know what it feels like to be othered and it's one of the reasons why fear has never been one of my default settings.

People watching on Copacabana Beach, Brazil

Travel taught me to question everything I thought I knew.

One of the reasons I fell in love with travel is that it took the version of the world I had been handed and said, "This is not the only way." It showed me that, much to my delight, time moves differently elsewhere. That success is defined differently. That joy, community, grief, and celebration are expressed in ways I had never imagined. It invited me into languages I didn’t speak but somehow felt. It led me to dive headfirst into meals that told stories, and spaces where I was not centered.

Travel is not always comfortable. And that’s the point.

We love to romanticize travel. The sunsets. The wine. The curated moments.

But the most transformative travel experiences? They challenge you. They ask you to sit in discomfort. To confront your assumptions. To recognize your biases, not with shame, but with responsibility. They ask you to listen more than you speak. To observe without immediately interpreting through your own lens. To understand that being a guest in someone else’s home, whether that’s a country, a community, or a culture, comes with an obligation to move with care. That kind of travel doesn’t just expand your worldview. It reshapes it. So let it.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Mark Twain

This quote has followed me for years because it captures something so essential. It teaches us that prejudice thrives in distance. It blooms in separation. And it flourishes in the stories we tell about people we’ve never met. But when you sit across from someone, share a meal, hear their laughter, and witness their humanity, it becomes much harder to reduce them to a stereotype.

That sounds so idealistic, right? And let's be honest, travel doesn’t automatically make anyone more inclusive. But it allows you to become more inclusive if you choose to engage with your experience fully.

Surf Life in Bali, Indonesia

Radical inclusivity is not optional. It’s necessary.

We are living in a time where neutrality is often framed as safety.

“Keep politics out of it." Or, "let's not make it about that." But for so many people, their identity is not political; it’s lived reality. Their safety. Their rights. Their ability to exist freely in the world. To ask for silence in the face of injustice is to ask for complicity. And as someone who has built a life and business rooted in connection, I cannot separate travel from humanity. From equity. From justice. Because who gets to travel safely? Who feels welcome? Who is represented, respected, and protected? These are not abstract questions. They are real, lived experiences.

The Only Way Forward... High-handed words, right? Fresh off the 'ol soap box. But trust me when I say, when we move through the world asking the following questions, our experiences are richer and so too are the communities we interact with....

What if we approached the world with curiosity instead of assumptions?

What if we saw difference not as a threat, but as an invitation?

What if we chose, actively and intentionally, to expand instead of contract?

Travel has taught me that the world is not something to fear. It is something to learn from.

To be in relationship with. To cherish. And in doing so, we don’t just become better travellers. We become better humans.

Wheels & Heels Accessibility Panel Sponsored by Air Canada

So choose Courage...

Being a xenophile in today’s world is an act of resistance. It is choosing love over fear. Curiosity over judgment and connection over division. It's believing that our differences are not what separate us, but what make us extraordinary. It's trusting that the more of the world we see, the more we understand our place within it, not at the centre, but as a small part of something far bigger, more beautiful and infinitely interconnected.