This picture was taken in the summer of 2014. Katha, a good friend of mine, took it while hiking the Rhine Valley. Two minutes before this was taken I had promised myself to transform my nebulous dream of traveling the world into a plan and then into a reality. At that point I was studying, I was about to finally, finally, finally (!) finish my degree. As soon as possible I wanted to get out of my claustrophobic student world and leave the university. In 2014 I told everybody about my plans. A degree, 9 month in the workforce, 2 month preparation and 2 years later I am finally there. I am going to travel the world.
The world is a big and diverse place. I want to see it with my own eyes - reading about these different worlds in magazines, on blogs and in books just isn't enough anymore. I am faszinated by all these different stories, circumstances and realities and I want to tell them myself. In my generation almost everybody is a traveller. We easily fly in and out of other countries and experience these cultures quickly. We spent our holidays in beautiful corners of the world to forget our own day-to-day problems, to escape our stressful lives. Complete relaxation. It's paradise. After two weeks we return to our jobs.
I don't have a job to return to, am not working on a career and I am a typical libra (star sign) - therefor find the small decisions to be the most difficult, can't decide on just one country, just one culture. I want to see the hole world. I don't want to see the end, when I am just beginning, don't want to have a 9-5. I want to see, smell and hear the hole world, want to fully experience the freedom that my homeland, my birth and my circumstances provide me with.
Every decision one makes while traveling (country, sleeping arrangments, travel mode) is a way to controle the amount of foreignness and cultural differences that the individual traveler can bear. For most, this is liberating and provides just enough sense of security to make the journey pleasurable. To me its the opposite. I feel like these decisions cut into and dominate my experience of the other culture. I would like to make these kinds of decisions rarely. I want to develope a view of the world that consists of countless pieces that, like a puzzle, can be merged into one consistent image. I'd like to be able to answer the question "What is the world?" in a fashion that echos the great Alejandro González Iñárritu in his film "Babel" (2006). He managed to communicate several truth through the juxtaposition of stories that are deeply rooted in the personel experience and thus create meaning far from abstraction, generalisme or judgment.
Currently I am sitting on a big pile of unsorted stuff, a to-do list that's a mile long and a seemingly endless number of decisions that have to be made. It's chaos - similar to this very pretty assortment of cables that, for the past 50 years, have brought electricity to a remote italian village in the mountains on the Amalfi coast... So they say.
Write a comment