By: theintrovertedtree
Inner search, Psychology,

Travelling

And when I will get there, will I still be me, always me? Carrying the cross, the burden, the occasional light… is it me? If we always carry ourselves with us, why do we like travelling so much?

We like the change of scenery, the change of reality. Even if the inner reality remains the same, I guess an outer change is refreshing for a while. Then we get used to our new surrounding and we need to change again. Are we moving forward, in circles, or just trying to avoid ourselves as if our own tail were chasing us relentlessly?

We travel because ‘there’ is, above all, ‘not here’. We are exposed to new stimuli. We collect new experiences that become part of our memory. We are enriched.

We come back. Sometimes we feel we are back to grey. Sometimes we feel we have been transformed; we are different. So, it was not just a collection of experiences then? We left a piece of our old selves over there and in exchange we brought a souvenir that shines in our soul with a new light. Not always, only sometimes.

Maybe it depends on how open we are, how we leave our own ideas, our own ‘selves’ behind, even if only for a little while. It is difficult to do this with routine, easier when we travel. To open our hearts and let life just pour in. To loosen the grip on the handrail a little. To breathe.

We are always ourselves, but for a little while we seem not to be under the tyranny of our minds. Is that what we seek when we travel, not to feel enslaved to our ego? In this search that is not a search, do we come closer to our true selves when we travel or do we get further from the centre?

Does music play the same role as travelling, a departure from ‘here’? Or is it, on the contrary, binding us to the now? Like a stream, making no sense without the previous or the following note, but constituting a present flow in the now.

The cloud, the rain, the mushroom, the sun, the forest, the rainbow, the beach in Autumn… notes in the music of travel. Peace as I just watch the rain fall on the estuary. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Cars drive along the narrow road. No one is in a hurry. Maybe this is why I travel, to find nothing.