My Snippet on Traveling

Written on September 30th 2021,

 
Traveling is learning to balance the predictability with the unpredictability. It’s learning to balance stability with instability. It’s learning to be okay when things don’t go as planned and instead of reacting negatively to the unpredictable, learning to embrace it with love and appreciation for the growth it provides.

Some days you might make your train. Other days you may miss it by a couple of seconds. There might be weeks where you meet amazing friends who become like family and change your life for the better. And at the same time, you could meet the most challenging people who have no desire to truly help you, but use you relentlessly for their own gain. Whether that’s trying to lie to the police about you to get out of them not paying because they ran out of money, or it could be a person on the street who steals all your valuables.

At the end of the day, you cannot predict every challenge, or else where would be the fun in the present moment? Part of challenges is learning the best way to handle them. The way that is least taxing in a negative way, and most beneficial for you and everyone around you.

There will be moments where you will feel alone. Like no one sees you. No one knows you and you might even wonder who you are on this trip. You might feel so unseen that you could just vanish and no one would even see and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. It makes one feel a deep appreciation for family, friends and one’s own community. To be seen. To be heard. To be loved is a very special feeling when you don’t feel any of that as you travel from city to city. From destination to destination.

But then you learn that love has always been there, but maybe you aren’t used to experiencing it or seeing it as a foreigner in a foreign land. Then you have to retrain yourself to see how you are divinely protected. Divinely loved by every interaction, every connection, and every place you travel. Not necessarily from a bodily stand point, but from your mere existence as an immortal divine soul.

You really start to conceptualize and intuitively enter into the realization of how we all willingly play roles, we all willingly choose our lives, where we were born, who we would like to come into contact with, the types of challenges we would like to experience. Not necessarily because we need to grow, but more so because we love to experience. If it’s also perfect with no contrast to imperfection, then how can you truly appreciate the depth of perfection? 

 I speak of perfection not meaning completion, but always fulfilled with not truly needing anything. Perfect in the sense of your awareness is experiencing a temporary forgetfulness of your true nature as perfection. Perfection as in the state of experiencing, being, exploring. Because what fun is it if you’ve already finished the journey and you have no where to go? What fun is it if you’ve already explored everything and now you have nothing new to learn, nothing new to challenge you?

If that is what true perfection is, then it would get boring after a while. Not expanding and just staying in the same spot, same experience, same completion would eventually warrant the desire to explore oneself. Then once one realizes we desire exploration, challenges, and new realities to inhabit, we start to not only welcome the good, but also the bad, knowing it is just as vital and beautiful to experience the contrast to truly experience the beauty.