The Legend of the Lucky Dwarf
I’ve been traveling, waiting for a moment of peace.
These stormy weathers got me thinking of how I want it to be.
Aren’t you excited? You don’t look happy — I really don’t know how my face looked like during that last month in Milan, guess not properly good. For sure, the first days of January were pretty stressful: I got scared like never before, so much that I smoked a cigarette after two tobacco-free weeks — my mother would have killed me for that, you can bet. That’s probably the tricky aspect about who, like me, has always been considered tough like a rock and for the first time shows some kind of weakness. Well, let’s talk straight: it’s not easy to leave all your certainties behind, your good payroll, to take a swim in the great unknown. In some way, that concern was a clear sign that, through the years, I left that 24 years old of me behind, once and forever. At that age I packed up my stuff and moved from a small village in the countryside to Milan overnight, but nine years later I have lost all that innocence and naïvety.
Somehow, seemed like all the people around were projecting their expectations on me, since mine was a choice that everybody would like to take once in a lifetime, but most of them don’t. Also during these last four years I heard often people telling me how lucky I was, just because I traveled a lot. If there’s one thing which I may consider myself lucky is that my rationality knows when it’s time to turn the page instead of experiencing a mental breakdown: I’ve been close to that several times in my life, but after all these years I’m still going on without using any lorazepam. Sure I have anxieties like everybody else in this world, I just try to deal with them and going further. For sure I had not any constriction which prevented me to leave: I had no children to feed, no pets to take care of, and my parents are still in good health, but most of these things are not a matter of fortune, just of choice.
Since I was a child I always felt a weirdo — or at least that’s how people made me feel — and in those pants you only have two options to choose: accept the conformism and never ask yourself about the alternatives, or running away from a place you just don’t fit to follow your feelings. In my hometown people often asked me what I was doing in the big city: probably they were expecting some spicy details about nights with tons of cocaine and orgies. Nope darling, has always been the same fucking routine: home and work, home and work, and weekends spent in leisures with friends. Boring, huh?
Also during this trip my mother reported me about people in our village who were telling her how courageous I was. Somehow, once again, I felt like a weirdo. That was really funny to me, because I never thought that traveling alone for a long time requires so much courage. Traveling alone makes you deal with solitude, for sure, and maybe this is what most of the people are really scared of, but after have lived for almost ten years independently, that has never been a big deal to me. True is that enjoying a meal or a drink with somebody is more pleasant than doing it alone, but seen how easy it is to make new friends around the world, most of the time you’re not on your own at all.
When I started documenting this trip, I wasn’t really sure about doing it, seen my idiosyncrasy about social networks and spotlights in the last years. It was due to my friend Giuseppe, who is a teacher in an art school, that suggested me to persist on this idea, one night back in Milano before I left. He told me about his students, how nowadays young people lacks about motivations, curiosity, about getting knowledge of what surround us. Thanks to his words I realized that, though it could have been a whole failure, at least I had to try.
Indeed, along the road I heard so many stories of people who changed radically their life in a sudden moment of their existence: this planet is full of people wandering in some part of the world, sometimes in a way more hippie than mine. People who changed their habits, who gave up to certainties, who moved in a place far thousands of kilometers from their hometowns. And it’s not a matter of fortune, neither of courage, just of starting the journey. Personally, turning that page has been the best thing I could have ever done in that right moment of my life. If someone died at 33, I actually resurrected.
If you have the chance, if you saved some money, pack up your things and leave all behind: there is nothing beyond your possibilities. The road in front of you could be unexplored, somehow scaring but, while you keep walking, there are so many things to discover, so many people who may inspire you. Everybody think that they feel comfortable only at home, in their comfort zone, but actually what you call home is not just a building with four walls. Home is everywhere. Above all, it’s inside of you.
Suggested Soundtrack
SOHN, Signal
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