17 February 2021

Great Journey 🏍 Day 169

There are moments when you are in the most beautiful surroundings and yet you are grumpy (sad, angry, tired, hungry, whatever). Because: no matter what your life looks like, no matter what you dream of, no matter how much you wish that everything is always peace and joy: you take yourself with you. Your experiences. Your emotions. Your "quirks" and reactions to situations.

We did not set out to run away from it all. We set out to live intensely. Not "away from" but "towards".

Even on our journey there are moments that we find less great, that annoy us, that make us sad. Why should that be any different on a journey?

SocialMedia, or should we say: the SocialMediaists, tend to show only the beautiful things. And why not? After all, each of us prefers to leaf through beautiful magazines, read well-written texts or watch films if they are well edited. 

But you can also report on fails in beautiful magazines, prose texts can still describe real, sometimes sad life, and well-edited films can report on the problems in the world. Why not?

So remember, when you follow all the travellers: they too take themselves with them. They continue to live their lives. They all have ups and downs, just like us.

The advantage of our journey is that we take a lot of time. That we look closely at what makes us tired, what makes us sad or angry. For us, slow travel means coming to terms with ourselves. Piece by piece. Not rushing from appointment to appointment, not rushing from call to call, but living in the moment. And taking as much time as we need for everything.

When there is a knock at the door and we can chat unexpectedly for 3 hours over tea. When we don't answer the phone every time it rings but decide for ourselves when the time is right for us. This also includes projects that we gave too little time to in our previous (rushed) everyday life.

Or if we notice that the ceiling is falling on our heads (yes, that also happens to us here in beautiful Greece), then we simply walk for a few hours to air out our heads and clear our hearts again.

However, we are very sure that everyone who is not travelling can also live this kind of freedom. Maybe not always, but in many small things. Putting the phone on silent, the midday round without a mobile phone, the evening without the TV or, while lying comfortably in the bathtub, listening carefully and asking yourself: "What exactly do I like about my life?

Can you bear silence? And do you dare to listen to your own answers?

Maybe the difference between travelling and not travelling is that there is more room to live in a self-determined way. And that is exactly what we like about our lives!

PS: We haven't eaten wisdom with spoons either, so we're still on the way. Still learning. That is precisely our "towards". 

#self-determined #aufundab #morehappythenunhappy #hinzu