What moves you? What makes you book a flight or train or two or three to move away from where you are and go somewhere far and foreign? When you get there, country after country passing you by as you hurtle forward, no boundary screaming out to tell you you have left country A and entered new-er terrain, save the friendly message from the local mobile provider; when you get there, what moves you? The sights you behold or the actual being there? Or the journey that brought you there? Do you fly to feel the wind beneath your wings or to get higher, to reach some other spot yonder, afar, a once out of grasp place?
Everything that you see and imbibe, is to be weighed against what exists in your biological, geographical makeup. Every hue of grass and sky is measured against the landscape that is emblazoned in your memory, that place called home. Is the grass really greener, the sky bluer? Belgian waffles become Belgian because we know them to originate from Belgium. A seemingly arbitrary signifier if we knew not better. We buy keychains with tulips and clogs because they have become symbolically emblems of the netherlands. We climb 503 steps up an ancient cathedral belfry, scaling new heights. And we, I am moved. Moved to tears on the inner walls of my heart because I have travelled far and my soul soars to come into contact with these new sights, these seemingly meaningless objects in their natural habitats. The symbolically symbolic and even the random Dunkin Donuts iced coffee in Cologne, Germany, of all places. Because little by little, each day, each minute the boundaries that separate our worlds, our continents, our nations are fading and losing their bold, stark absoluteness. We pass each other as ships in the night, open our mouths and a pocket of our hearts to strike conversations with some, and for that one night or two we are in the same boat, in the same part of the world, we are both and all travellers, there to partake of that town, that city and the prerequisite smells, and native beers.
In the same day you can visit a century old town square and then play cluedo with friends in a dormitory room, the epic and the mundane in one day, just because you can. That potentiality, that vastness of possibility, multiple and varied, moves me. Moves me beyond the reach of my prior imagination and maybe upon recollection. Whether or not we have the photographs to remember those moments by, the manner in which we are moved might remind us that not only is the world a magical place, but that we might be capable of magical things beyond the realm of our current imaginations.
the hard part about soaring is having your heart weighed down by missing absent loved ones a million miles away.
in plainer terms, amsterdam. cologne. luxembourg. leuven. brussels. …done. more to come=)
button
