Travels and life lessons
What are the greatest lessons that travel around the world has left me in recent years? Making a summary of it is not a trivial exercise. There are many and many I think I have also forgotten or in any case lost them along the way. I will try in any case, through this post, to summarize them, telling you 5 that have really represented a turning point in my life.
Never shut yourself up in the house
Do you know what I do when I feel I have reached the bottom, perhaps as a result of bad personal experiences? I call my travel agent. Yep, that’s right. Traveling has always been my best natural antidepressant. Moreover, there are no contraindications. And the destination is not important, and it is also not important that it is a destination I’ve never been to. The important thing is to leave. Indeed, start again. Prepare your suitcase, wake up at dawn and show up at the airport. You see, these words expressed thus far can refer to real travel experiences. But, with not too much imagination, they can be applied to the approach to life in general. Never stop. Never think that you have arrived, even when we feel comfortable where we are. There is still so much beauty outside that door and so little time to see it all in all.
There is always time to start.
I could also have said “those who have time don’t wait for time”, but the meaning is the same. The concept is very simple, it comes from the experience of travel but is applied equally to real life. You can start traveling at any age. I recommend, as I did, to start young but I understand that for many it is not always possible, either because of economic limits, or because of mental limits. But there is always time to start. I know people who took the first plane at the age of 70 and since then, despite the ailments of age, they have never stopped. The same attitude applies in life. There is no deadline for emotions, for changes, for courage, even the most daring ones, life is not made up of sealed phases for which certain experiences can only be lived in certain moments. No. Life is a journey and even those who, due to character limitations, have always lived with the brake on, when they feel like it, can give it up and dive into what life can offer, even better if all this does with the curiosity of the traveler.
The world and life are full of opportunities
When you start traveling, when you do it seriously by going outside the usual tourist routes and the usual world destinations, you learn to discover the great variety of the world. Variety of cultures, environments, food, faces, eyes, everything. It is a crazy school of life that teaches you the value of diversity, a contradiction to a world in which, on average, diversity is seen as a danger. Diversity is the salt of this world and also that of life, in which the concept of diversity is transformed into that of opportunity, or rather in the succession of different situations that may arise along our path. There are endless, even for those who despair because they think that life is over for him / her. Just leave the house (in a physical and metaphorical sense) and life is very capable of surprising us with new encounters, new experiences. It only takes that little effort on our part to abandon the sofa of our habits, wear a pair of comfortable shoes and set out on the unpredictable paths of existence. There are always new curves and new landscapes behind them ready to amaze us, to leave us speechless.
Better alone, sometimes
Another not very common feature of my travels is that I often travel alone. I’ve always liked it so much. Traveling alone has many advantages: first of all you are free to really do what you want, with your times, your limits and your potential. But then traveling alone also has a strong self-analysis value, as if you lie down on the psychoanalyst’s couch and ask yourself questions and answers. It is beautiful, almost always, disturbing at times, because in the solitude of the journey we come to discover sides of ourselves that we never even imagined. However, it remains an absolutely useful exercise for developing self-awareness.
Wrong destinations and failures
I don’t always like what I see when I travel. Having traveled practically all over the world I can tell you with certainty that there are places that really do… and I would never go back to. But that’s okay too. When I happen to cross half the world by plane to get to the city where I then want to leave the next day, I try to face the wrong travel choice for what it is, an error of route. I have wrong destinations and I will be wrong in the future. But that’s okay. Not for this I stop traveling. Indeed, returning to take the globe and drawing new routes is the best reaction when you take the wrong road, in travel as in life. Travel and life therefore teach us to have great faith in tomorrow, they teach us that regardless of how good and bad we saw yesterday, tomorrow promises to amaze us, once again, giving unexpected happiness to those who have the courage to be found by life always with the suitcase ready.
