Wanderlust

Opened my eyes to life,  I saw a system, a certain dynamism that everybody functioned upon it. School, university, study, a good job, good salary, a good place o stay, and finally create your own family. But deep down, since I was a kid I felt that it wasn’t my path, felt that am not going to walk on that path, I didn’t belong to that crowd, I couldn't find my place there.

What kept me going was my daydreams, being in the car as my father drove, and looking at adds of places around the globe and pictures on billboards, always fantasizing about being there, that my place is out there. Looking at foreigners from all over the globe and just wondering about their lives, their traditions, their believes, and the lives they came from. I remember that portrait that my father’s friend painted, a portrait of a place in Asia, with all the rice fields,  buffaloes in the streets and a lady selling her vegetables. Always looking deep into that portrait and living it. Having this strong innate to explore new places and meet different people who didn't speak my language and didn’t know the place I came from. That rare human connection regardless of any judgments, that connection that soon dissolved with as technology emerged.

Watching national geographic and seeing all of the raw human existence that’s not exposed to materialism or having any virtual connections, humans who grew their own foods and made their own fires, harvested the crops that they grew, and worrying about nothing. They spoke that divine language that our world once forgot.

Daydreams that left smiling like a fool, and feeling that thrill of traveling and leaving the crowd, dropping all societies expectations. Those nights I spent with my music imaging myself on the road and my mind playing all the possible outcomes and surprises I might encounter.

That passion of travelling the world grew hand in hand with the passion of being there for people, that beautiful joy of helping people out, them sharing themselves with me because I did the same, them being vulnerable in front of me because I did, we didn’t have any walls or boundaries between us , we found joy in life’s simplest forms. I felt their pain and their joy, lived their moments, felt their anger, their enthusiasm and their fears. Just like relating to those scenes from national geographic, and those random people on the streets from different countries and that random portrait drawn by my father’s friend showing a glimpse of his country and childhood life, I felt feelings that weren’t mine and didn’t own, feeling of the otherness a whole new level of empathy.

Days have passed but I sensed that other world, I was living it, it was all over, and you can tell the ones that see it as well. Knowing that there’s something more about life, something lying out there waiting for you to pick it up and carry one, knowing that everyone of us has their own customized pick, our purpose. It’s like the ordinary life, or the systematic one starts preparing you without even realizing it, tools of the extraordinary present in the ordinary, the visible being the portal for the invisible. Coming in all shapes and forms, sentences that you might pick from a book, or moments picked up by a sunset, or in a form of a random human being teaching the lesson that you need to learn, a lesson to be taught.

A wanderlust! My favorite word, it leads to people of the same, who have those curious eyes, so curious that pisses fear off, because they choose not to see any fears. It leads to people who have that heart of exploration, going deep within the invisible, that world of magic, that was once all over the place and now forgotten by many. Conquering  hearts by planting pieces of them in every soul they meet, that’s a wanderlust’s mission.