We all love to travel? Don't we? I have seldom come across people who say NO! But I am sure some people don't enjoy it as much. But the majority would say a biggggg yes!
I take some time to reflect on this & realise why we enjoy it so much and how we associate ourselves with it.
It is something it makes us feel...
We know it messes us up, but we all still want to take that break, that vacation which we plan to take time off. Because the mess is good, it leaves us craving for more, more of the place we travelled to, the more of the free time, the more of relaxation. I reckon when I am back home, something has changed, in the few days of travel. It is moving from familiarity and our comfort zone to an opposite - unknown!
Travel symbolizes new beginnings and endings, like rebooting our body system and routine. You enter a new city and become an outlander. You feel like a child, curiously exploring the place, trying to make sense of everything around you - reading the signboards, cautious of the routes, the places to return to, visit in coming days etc. And in the span of few days, we leave some part of ourselves behind. We stay there, even when we have returned. When it is time to bid farewell, we feel sad, almost grieve.
I will always feel lucky and grateful to have had these travel experiences ingrained into my consciousness. You get a bizarre feeling when you're about to leave a place like you will not only miss the surroundings, people, food, and culture but you'll miss the person you are at this time at the very place because you realise you'll never be this way ever again. Life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born, then moments die. For new experiences to come to life, the old ones must wither away, don't you think?
Anybody who travels with passion in the heart like the great traveller himself, Marco Polo who did not stay in a place from cradle to grave, with love to explore themselves and the world around them knows they move to be moved. It is not about seeing the Great Wall or Eiffel Tower or being on the move. Travelling simmers intrinsic elements - like a shift in the mood, emotions, feelings that arouse when you witness wonder, that you never ordinarily see when you are getting through your daily life.
The daily life which in comparison is fairly what I would call rigidly structured. A busy life we all lead at other times. It’s hard to imagine doing so little every day. I'm sure we all have experienced it, even my limited free time feels rushed these days having so many things to choose from - Should I read? Listen to music? Go for a run/walk? Watch TV? I certainly can say, my travel times have been one of the most formative, important times of my lifetime. A time of great growth, self-learning and unfolding within the spaciousness & mindfulness.
I wish there was a sort of time-lapse to measure how people change with departures and arrivals.
And yet with all the chaos it brings to our life, we take the mighty leap, you can't help but feel that perhaps humans are meant to be happy on the move, then living in a place, uprooting their identity and being a nobody in a new place. They seem unable to shake off the pleasures that are mooring them through this expedition, dwelling on the experiences assimilated by them, instead of focussing on what lies ahead, luring themselves in the symphony of the bliss of being somewhere new! Leaving them hanging, longing to return to the place to be a newly turned leaf.
And, if you ask me when I am back after a vacation, I’m never the same as I left.
