Many people say that they love traveling. They enjoy the fun of doing it and how each travel can add happiness to their bucket of happiness. But what is the real definition of traveling? How can you define traveling?
For me, traveling is a media. Of course, traveling can also be a goal to achieve. Traveling is a media for me to discover new knowledge, meeting new people and learn from their life stories. I enjoy walking by myself in a new area during my travel. I also enjoy making conversation with the people around (but not in a busy metropolitan city, for sure, since they don’t have time to build a conversation). Or simply flowing with the situation – sitting facing paddy field, drinking hot tea in a cold traveling day or enjoying chocolate cake in front of me. All those little things add some flavors to my life stories.
I believe that traveling is also a term that we can use to express the journey of our life. I’ve got this good metaphor from a movie ‘Blind Side’ – with Sandra Bullock as the main actress – which said that a person is like an onion, we need to peel them off one by one. I agree with that metaphor! Life has so many layers and in order to understand what life is all about, we need to give time and peel the layer one by one. By doing so, we travel. We take the journeys to the core of our life by giving it time, giving it our best effort – and of course, choosing the right knife to help us in the peeling process.
When we travel through life, we learn that we need to adjust our speed. Sometimes we are too slow in one journey, so we need to speed up. It’s usually happen when we are into deep or too attached with a certain experience or person and we simply don’t want to let it to. Sometimes we hang in too long with bitter experiences, because we think that will be our ‘tool’ to gain attention from by passers. In another time, we walk too fast. It seems that time is too short and we want to maximize our limited 24-hour period. In this case, we would rush and press down everything. We don’t want to lose the moments – but the truth is that sometimes we lost it by being too fast. We can’t enjoy the process, for being too focus on the results. We don’t want to stop every now and then, to check whether we’re tired, need some adjustments or almost die! Just because we want to reach the end. Well, we might reach the end line – knackered.
I love to give time to my traveling experiences – as in visiting places, or experiencing life. It is always surprising for me to find new discoveries on how someone can slowly show their true self after a while. That’s a good traveling in my sense.
Happy weekend, everyone!
Enjoy your life – and your traveling experiences.
My Writing Paper 