Home and Away

I have been blessed with a lot of travels in my life. A lof of opportunities to be see the places through the eyes of local people, to learn more about cutlures, habbits, insights, colours and, ultimately, people and life.

I feel like indeed, Saint Agustine had a point saying that “the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” I also learned a while ago that those who don’t travel probably don’t end up experiensing the darker side of travel. Besides all the beautiful experiences, besides new impression, new friends, new tastes and smells, you also have loneliness, anxiety, uncertainly, self doubt, worrying about your security and wellbeing.

You get a quick experience of life you don’t necessarily understand or know very well but you have to function in it just as well as the people who spend their evey day in that reality. You learn to navigate, talk to strangers, trust people you never met before and adapt.

After past few trips that were only separate barely by a day going to Berlin, Amsterdam, Porto, back to Amsterdam and then South Italy, my eyes and heart are full but my body is nudging for some rest, some alone time, some grounding. And it’s okay. It’s okay to understand that we don’t only have that well manicured and cultivated social media boosted side of travel which looks like a post card, but also pain from super small plane seats, exhaustion, trust issues, lack of creativity, because you are in the most gorgeous places but you don’t have emotional space to connect…. and probably the list goes on.

And yet with all that said, I don’t want to stop. I want to travel through smells and colours, to learn and grow and I remember this beautiful quote from Sarah Kay “Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away.”

Atlantic Ocean, October 8th, 2021 - Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal