WHY DO WE TRAVEL?

From time to time, I feel like my body, my brain, my moral were asking me to wander.

About four times a year my limbic system screams for never-ending roads, unexpected glances, unintentional beauties, intimate strangers.

Why do we travel?

The bug bites you, or the addictions starts in the first long trip, in the first path taken with your own feet, in the first personal and unique decision you make between turning left or right, in a foreign country, in a street whose name you cannot pronounce.

But what really triggers the addiction are the epiphanies. The constant, multiple epiphanies about the human condition.

To glimpse at the lack of importance of the everyday matters which corrode us, such as professional success, material purchases, personal image… When we travel, all those things lose their very sense of existence, they lose their importance, they lose the capacity to burn us up. The question about if they really mattered one day makes us restless, and then soothes us… No, they never really mattered.

Another epiphany is the notion of your own culture in a way you never experienced before. The conscious and reflection on your own culture is much more intense when you compare it to others. It is outside Brazil that I feel, irreversibly, Brazilian.

But the most important epiphany there is, the one that makes me spend all my money and free time in a way my family disapproves of is the realization of my own smallness.

Traveling, learning new languages, knowing new cultures, meeting new people and the way they face life, death, troubles, that’s what makes us feel so small.

I feel truly useless and unnecessary in the world when I travel the world. I understand that the world functions without me and, at times, better without me. I remember Fernando Pessoa saying “The reality does not need me”… In fact, it doesn't.

I see people so much more content than me, or not. More artistic than me, or not. So much more human than me, or not…

I feel unimportant. It reminds me that I will never do anything truly timeless, I will never be able to change the Earth’s rotating shaft, because the world is infinitely bigger than me, more important than me… And that is liberating!

The peace that comes from having no pretensions, of not claiming anything, and still having the privilege of wandering this Earth and witnessing its crudity, its beauty, its imperfection… That is why I travel.