Does life really “not escape us” by travelling?
“We travel not to escape life, but for life not escape us”
Anonymous.
Indeed, most travellers are not cowards that flee their life constraints or their eventual problems, but are actually happy people craving discovering the world and experience the great adventure! I used to agree with this quote from this dear anonymous fellow, even though a few of the travellers might really travel to fly away from something.
Nonetheless, I had this conversation with myself few weeks ago. A conversation about the sense of this quote regarding to my feelings at this moment.
It seems that something is escaping me
It’s been two years now that I am traveling far from my relatives and the life I had before. I have lived in three different countries in two years and I am now planning the number four.
As usual, I feel pretty exited to take off for new adventures, however a strange feeling is staring at me.
First and foremost, there is this “life before” that I don’t want to escape, the place where I come from, the people that made me.
Then, I wonder: “Are you escaping life in general when you are traveling?”
Afterwards I realise that every time I leave a country I am unknowingly escaping my life there, whether I am in a place for a short or a long time:
If I stay in a place for a short while, I escape life cause I stop it from happening. The time is too short to fully experience the place, the people and to really build relationships with them.
If I stay in a place for a long period, at the end I leave my friends, all the good things and the bad… I am saying goodbye to a life I have created with the aim of ending it one day.
As a matter of fact, I am a bit confused about what the sense of the travel life is… Lost in thought, I suddenly understand that I have missed something in my reflexion.
These people that tamed me all along the way, from my brother to my last fellow, they are my rhythm!
My life is surrounded by these shining stars, which are growing with me and I am traveling for us, because this is who I am and this is what make us. They make my life complete.
At the end…
Everybody knows that besides being extraordinary, the travel lifestyle can be tough sometimes. But this is a passion, a way of living like another, in which only the best stay.
At the end we are all humans trying to find our way of living and sticking to it, nothing less, nothing more. Traveling is definitely not escaping life, traveling is not a new life, but instead a way to shape life and the art of combining different ones. Life is not escaping from us, we are playing with it.
