Sunday 18 June 2017

Gone...missing?

"Just because I'm losing... doesn't mean I'm lost... doesn't mean I'll stop [...]" Chris Martin (Coldplay).


Traveling is very much akin to losing. Losing your inhibitions, your expectations, your apprehensions. Without a doubt, those who have a taste for shifting spaces and shifting places must have lost something in themselves that they are trying to recover through traveling. 


On the road

It is very easy to lose yourself in anticipation of what elsewhere will be like. It's not about the grass being "greener", more so the grass being different, alluring and promising. There is always a sense of adventure in going for what has never been experienced before. In this globalised world, we see, hear, smell new places day-in day-out, whether or not we want to. Most of us enjoy the comfort of knowing that the new exists while appreciating that the new will never be part of our routine. That is what "different" means in reality: something foreign, useful to compare our own lives to, helping us grow and break the mould of our collective experience.



A heart formed by a splitting river

But different also means something else. It is what fascinates and scares. It is what reminds us that despite being humans, we can never be the same. It is what, any time and any place, causes us to stop and step back and become observers of our lives. What succession of events dots my lifeline? What is my trajectory on the geodesics of this world? How relative is my world in the light of multiple frames of reference? Are we coexisting or do we belong to individual spacetime continui? 




Spaced out

There is much turmoil in realising that our existences are not uniform and that there is no truth in this world. What some decide to yearn for means nothing to others. What certain people believe with all their might is derided by other people. What drives me to move forward is what pushes others to fall back. So when each of these worlds intersect, a re-evalution becomes necessary to avoid misunderstandings, collisions and hurts. It is necessary to become the observer of the other person's timeline, not just as a way to attest his/her existence, but also to learn from it.


World map of flight connections

Often, we wait onto inspiration from role-models, famous figures and other examples established in our communities. But this is not satisfying, because who is closest to us quickly becomes invisible to our eyes, heart and mind. In fact, what inspires us is what creates magic in front of us: the mystical, the puzzling. What else could it be, if not what is strange, unusual and...different? Inspiration is therefore nothing but that moment we realise that our lives can shift to another timeline, that there are multiples possibilities ahead of us and that we have the option of veering in any direction.





Losing yourself

Sure, this has the effect of making us dizzy, anxious, prostrated after a while, but inspiration often assaults us for a brief moment. The process of traveling is always the same: deciding, organising, moving, discovering, adapting. Herein lies the challenge. This is why, although most of us can be inspired to go, only a set of happy fews head away. And those who have remained start to question their traveling mates. Where are you now? What time is it there? When are you coming back? What people who remain never realise is that those who are gone are never missing. They have shifted their individual lives to the universal scale. They are busy writing their stories for others to read...