For a really long time now I’ve been attracted to the idea of solo traveling. I always looked with wonder at those people who dared to pack their lives in a single suitcase and leave the familiar behind, hungry for some adventure.
On a few occasions, I began to plan my own journey, but it never moved past that point. Until recently, when life gave me an open door to start bringing out the wanderer in me.
When people talk about traveling, there is often an image of some overseas destination, so different and exotic in comparison to your usual environment. I believe we have put too much focus on how different the place has to be, as if the point of traveling is to compete by who has traveled more or farther away. As a result, traveling often feels too unattainable. We forgot there are many places in our relative proximity that could offer us small glimpses of adventure.
With every new year, my focus shifts more from quantity to quality. It’s not about how big your list of visited countries is, how trendy those places are, or how long the trips lasted. What matters more is the depth of the experience you have.
How have the place, its culture, and people influenced you? What have you learned about the world and yourself through that experience? In what ways have you grown as a person?
It’s about the inner knowing that you get, and a feeling that stays in your body from the interaction you had with this new world. How it changes you. How it makes you feel like a wealthy person, because of all the curiosity that was born in you, and all the new wonders that it led you to. Because of your eyes that stayed wide open, and the horizons that consequently became broader.
Wealthier for the parts of you that you haven’t felt in a long time, or you maybe met for the first time.
I believe that is the ultimate goal of traveling. Discovering yourself. And through that, learning more about this life.
In my new attempts to welcome change in my life and bring out more of who I really am, I decided to share parts of my journey with you. How will those travels look? How often will I be traveling? I have no idea. But maybe that’s the beauty of it. Not having everything planned, but simply trusting that new adventures are coming.
For such a very long time, I had a desire to create something like this. An inner urge to explore my world in new ways, and to share with others small pieces of where my feet take me, what my eyes see, and what my soul feels. I am so excited to finally do this.
I’ll call this series ‘Solo Traveling Diaries.’ I hope it brings some sort of magic into your life as well, and inspires you to go on some new inner and outer adventures.
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