My father, who was an immigrant and became an ardent world traveler, believed that nothing was more important than education, and that no education was complete without an appreciation for what could be learned from travel. Even if it required sacrifices to get there, the rest of the world was, for him, a required course.

My first trans-Atlantic crossing was on a prop plane – it took 26 hours, making stops in Newfoundland, Iceland, Shannon (Ireland) and finally London. My bible on that trip was Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day. Over the intervening decades, I have been to places where I spoke the language and places where I couldn’t even read the street signs; I have traveled with friends, with groups, with my mother, with my children, with my husband – and alone. (My darkest moment was in a dingy youth hostel room with only a can of sardines to eat; the key broke off just as I began to roll back the lid, so I ended up picking out the pieces of fish with an eyebrow tweezer.)

Until my most recent trip, those experiences were like postcards in the scrapbook of my life; this time, I began to see the bigger picture. On the India trip, I became aware of how, for me, the experience of traveling is about a particular kind of looking; I’ll call it insight-seeing. By that I mean high-intensity staring - out of train or bus windows, sitting in cafes for hours on end - in an almost Zen state that generates a searching internal conversation very different from the random brooding I do back at home. (The altered state is magnified when those conversations aren’t interspersed with out-loud exchanges with other people. “I’m living on the edge of a shriek” my nineteen-year-old self, alone in North Africa, wrote in her journal).

Perhaps because of where I am in my life, or perhaps because so many of the women I write about are finding travel an emerging priority, I watched myself travel. During the long drives from Agra to Jaipur to Pushkar to Jodhpur to Udaipur, I paid attention to how what I saw hit my mind screen – split-second images of moments in strangers’ lives, multiplied over hours. Like the flicker of old-fashioned movies, it is hypnotic. Over time my thoughts go from micro to macro. No matter what the locale, sooner or later I catch myself thinking: “It’s amazing how every human being is basically just trying to live their life – eat, love, defecate, laugh, get from one place to another – just like me.” A cliché, but also a humbling thought.

Watching people laughing, gesticulating, or simply engaged in some transaction, I think about language. If I were standing next to them, I would be no better able to understand what they were saying than I am watching their silent body language. The sounds that make millions of other people laugh or cry or fight are meaningless to me. I am struck by how random communication is. And how miraculous.

The interaction of human beings and nature overwhelms me. The timeless world of agriculture. The violation created by plastic bags – in Morocco they hang on bushes in the desert like giant spider webs. The power of a rushing river and the pitiable look of a dried up riverbed. I am haunted by the cruelty to animals I have seen in Mexico and wonder at the eerie absence of birds in Beijing. I am moved beyond words in the rural north of India where the Hindu world view protects the hundreds of generic yellow dogs who wander the highways with impunity - while cars swerve maniacally - along with camels, elephants, and, of course, cows. And by the fortitude of the men and women walking alongside them.

Such epiphanies take on added meaning now, I think, because the travel experience translates into real-life terms and in a humanity-wide context, the questions women like me are exploring as we get older. We are confronting the unknown – testing our mettle against the unexpected – seeing things in a new light, reconsidering our personal agendas, and pushing against old frontiers. The ongoing conversations with ourselves that come with this transition in life, like those internal insight-seeing dialogues on the road, are a creative interplay between present-day possibilities and past experiences. And meditations on the nature of life. For us, traveling is both an answer to the question “What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” and an opportunity to take that question to a more profound level.