This question makes me ponder…why do we travel?
What is it about travelling, to places known and unknown that captivates us?
Seeing new sights? Meeting new people? Experiencing something out of the ordinary? An adventure for our palates and taste buds? Marinating our senses in a yet undiscovered sauce of life? Making new memories?
Could it be that we are searching for something we lost as a child?
Could it be about reliving a memory? Reliving a love story? Reliving the pure joy of experiencing something for the first time? Reliving the loss of a beloved in places we found them and lost them?
It could be all of that and more, right?
What if I say, to me travel is always where I meet myself. The luminous self that I left behind to become who I am today.
I mean, hasn’t travelling always been considered the “go-to” path we choose to understand ourselves; sometimes in a whole new way, sometimes illuminating the parts of us we have lost touch with, sometimes just yearning to be the child we once were. Perhaps thus able to understand why we have become who we are today?
Travel is a mirror that sometimes throws a new reflection of me catching me by surprise. Sometimes reflecting an old me that I was forced to turn my back on.
Every place I go, my heart opens itself to it like it is learning the language of love for the first time. No wonder it dissolves into the essence of the place thus becomes a part of it.
“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.”
To me travel is all about embodying this quote. It leaves me with a hint of nostalgia, flowering with a pride of being alive and being with the moment, a sense of overwhelming loneliness, a flush of purity, a burning desire to fall in love with life itself and also a quiet reconciliation with the world and the deep contentment that stems from it.
Travel reconnects me with my childhood; a kingdom of spontaneity and curiosity, that routine and ennui of daily existence kills everyday. It fills the empty spaces of my inner crossword. Some years have seen me turning the pages of the daily calendar, one day to the next only awaiting my next travel destination.
Could the reason I travel be that I get to be the child I was in Castlerock all over again? To be the little me living in the lap of mother nature in a place hidden from the eyes of the world. To lighten the load of life I carry as if I am Atlas myself?
Could it be that I travel all over the world just so I could taste Castlerock all over again in my soul?
Could it be that all I yearn for now in places unknown have their answers in places known only to me?
Now that is a dream destination worth exploring, no?
Leaving you with my top 10; a slideshow of nostalgia, each one a dream destination. Each one taken by cameras that themselves have faded into oblivion. Each one a slice of nature and me together, in ways only the child within understands. Each one a dream worth revisiting over and over if not in person, atleast in my memory palace.
Time caught in pixels where I came close to meeting the child I left behind in Castlerock to become the adult who now spends all her time reminiscing about it!
Care to drop a tiny pearl from the ocean of your mind?