Why Travel?
“So, seems that you like to travel a lot? It did not look like this back then.”
I realized that it is difficult to convince someone that you actually hate traveling when what you are doing is constantly changing your geographical coordinates. How can you explain to anybody, that actually you think that tourism is a crime while you are in a different country every few months?
I suppose my home is this constantly evolving trajectory. I wish all this would be possible without leaving the few square meters – seeing the horizon, enjoying the red of the tomato on your bread in the sunshine, going to pee or washing your clothes as if every time doing this would be celebrating the mundane, being nobody, a nobody with the eyes of the new born calf? Then I would tell you the same as Fernando Pessoa:
“You want to travel? To travel you simply need to exist. In the train of my body or of my destiny I travel from day to day, as from station to station, leaning out to look at the streets and the squares, at gestures and faces, always the same and always different as, ultimately, is the way with all landscapes.
If I imagine something, I see it. What more would I do if I traveled? Only extreme feebleness of imagination can justify anyone needing to travel in order to feel.
Any road, this simple road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world.’ But the end of the world, once you’ve exhausted the world by going round it, is the same Entepfuhl from which you set out. In fact the end of the world, and its begin, is merely our concept of the world. It is only within us that landscapes become landscapes. That’s why if I imagine them, I create them; if I create them, they exist; if they exist, I see them just as I do other landscapes. So why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the North and South Poles, where I would be other than inside myself, feeling my particular kind of feelings?
Life is whatever we make it. The traveler is the journey. What we see is not what we see but what we are.”
Fernando Pessoa: ” The Book of Disquiet”
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This entry was posted on 2012-03-31 at 03:56 and is filed under English, Photo, Stories and Tales, Travel diary with tags art of everyday, buddhist, Fernando Pessoa, hitchhiking, traveling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2012-03-31 at 17:48
“Life is whatever we make it. The traveler is the journey. What we see is not what we see but what we are.”
Very good quote. Whatever we bring to the situation is what defines the situation. If I have a prejudicial notion concerning a place or an ethnic group, this will definitely color my view of that place or ethnic group before I even reach that particular destination.
When traveling, the road is part of the journey, but how we perceive and experience that road is the real journey–who we are inside IS the journey. Do we have a good attitude or a bad attitude about life in general? We are always projecting ourselves onto places, persons and things.
If a man is blind, he can see nothing. So if a blind man and man who has eyes are traveling through Salmon, Idaho (which is a very beautiful place surrounded by mountains), the man with eyes says that the scenery is beautiful, but the blind man doesn’t see the beautiful scenery.
Travel is risk. You are going to unknown places and discovering new things and new people. Life is risk. People need to explore outside the box–outside their preconceived notions–break free from the slavery of their man-made, protective shells.
“High Plains Drifter: A Hitchhiking Journey Across America”
http://tim-shey.blogspot.com/2010/02/high-plains-drifter-hitchhiking-journey.html