On travelling (2)

Travelling is moving through another world without participating in it but experiencing it from the outside. A traveller does not really belong to the world where he or she moves. It can be compared with playing, insofar one does it for the joy of doing it but does not take it seriously. However, in a certain sense it is not true that travelling is a thing besides the world. Nothing is inhuman what humans do and this is also true for travelling. Travelling is a part of the real life, both for the traveller and for those persons in the travelled world that, for instance, get an income from the travelling of other people or that have in another sense a certain relation with the traveller. Travelling is simply a fact of life. And where does simply moving to another place end and does travelling begin?Travelling needs not to be physical but can also take place in the mind. The quality of physical travelling improves if it takes place with an attentive mind, but how many people travel not only with their legs and brains but also with their minds?

On returning

When I move to the other end of the world, the centre of the world moves with me. And when I go back home, I am sure that the centre of the world will go back home with me again. But before that time has come, how difficult it is to understand that the daily routine will come back then. How far away “normal” life is during the time that you are still in the country you are visiting. That is the similarity between leaving and returning: In a certain sense before leaving and before returning there is no future.

On travelling

Normally it is so that when I look to the future there are many things that I have planned to do or that I expect that will happen. Of course, it is not so that everything happens as I thought that it would happen, but I have clear expectations about it. One can say that the future is real for me and that there exists a future for me in a psychological way. How different everything is however, when I have planned a journey. When the date of the travel comes near, it is as if the future stops at the day of my departure. This is not only so when I want to make an unplanned journey, as I often do; a journey in which I have only a vague idea about the region I want to visit, and where I decide what to do when I am there and from day to day. No, the future stops also when I have decided to make a planned journey and when I know beforehand in which hotels I’ll sleep, which routes I’ll follow, and more or less which places and sites I am going to visit. Also then the future stops at the day that I have planned to leave and what comes then is a kind of nothing, as if the world stops turning around. Is that also the feeling that a person has who has been sentenced to death and knows the date of his execution?