A Year Of Traveling
Resetting The System
“You can always start over “ Facundo Cabral (This Is A New Day)
Traveling is a way to hack the experience of life, reset our personality, and give ourselves the chance to start over.
My Story
Let’s break down my life so far:
- 25 years of exposition
- one year of living
If every year were a separate movie, the only one I would re-watch would be the movie of this year: best cast, plot, and pacing. I learned that every year should hold its own and be rich enough to be considered a separate movie. Years as a setup for a sequel never worked for me.
On the plane from Colombia to Israel, after a year of traveling, I looked out the window and asked myself: “if the plane crashes right now, am I satisfied with my life this year?” My answer was: “heck yeah… now I need to make sure that on the next plane I’ll be as well.”
Every year should end with the question: if my “life plane” crashes right now, will I be satisfied with this year?
“What Now?”
Traveling is the ultimate restart button. After a year on the road, It’s hard not to feel like a baby that’s one year old now.
Immersing myself with new behaviors, environments, and learning a new language, has reshaped my brain in a way that’s entirely new. People ask me: “what now?”, and I feel as if I were an infant that needs to layout a life-plan with flowcharts and statistics projections.
In our society, there is no room for not knowing. If you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you’re fucked. That’s the fear mongering you get from every person around you if you decide to reshuffle the deck of your life. People are intimidated by changes and will do anything to avoid them even if they don’t influence them directly. Suppression and denial are the first things that people draw around you when you’re changing your life.
My 91 years old grandmother is still convinced I’ll “turn to my senses” soon and study to be a dentist.
So “what now?”… I don’t know.
There is no formula to life, it’s a research, continuous research.
When you’re not afraid of exploring, you can start advancing the journey. There is no end point to this, only the evolution of self-understanding. I can spend the best years of my life learning how to be a dentist (evil bastards), or USE them studying myself.
Self-study is the most underrated form of education. We never prioritize it and save it to some future retirement point, where the self-study will be more of a summary and a looking back.
Traveling is a platform that allows self-exploration and embraces it, unlike anything we have in society nowadays. If you’re looking to create changes in your life, hit the road, right now.
Usually, no one understands, relates, or supports. You’ll find support only on the road. Once you do, you’ll see that your immediate environment doesn’t represent the whole world. You can formulate a tribe that will not only relate but inspires and supports you along the way.
The Present Moment
“The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.” Eckhart Tolle
Death is a tragedy if life was not well lived.
There is no life contract, it’s more like a kill list, and sometimes Mother Nature decides to have some layoffs. The majority doesn’t get a: “heads up… you’re next”. The ones who do, usually start living fully and fast.
The irony is that we all know we’re on the list, but we don’t live like it. We should live like there is no sequel to this movie. We should tap into the present and dethrone the past and the future from our psyche.
Traveling this year has given me the best education on the present moment: how to develop a mindset grounded in the now.
Mindset
Mindset is everything. It’s the precursor to action or inaction, and that determines everything.
To create a resilient mindset, we need to train our personality. From my experience, I find that personality operates like software, not hardware. We can replace the disk, and run some updates from time to time. The software of our personality is context dependent, if we remove the previous environment, we can create a different self.
The logic is simple: to create a different warrior; you need to change the dojo.
Traveling will switch the dojo over and over so you can have the chance to train different aspects of yourself, and grow in many directions. You train a new behavior long enough, and soon you’ll hear things like: “for you, it’s easy to meet people, you’re very social…”. Every time this happened to me this year, I thought: “I wish the mute teenage version of me were here to hear this (:”
Bottom line: to get anywhere new and succeed we need to install a resilient mindset and grow it. There are no stores that sell the disks yet; we need to burn the software into our brains through experience, and hardship.
Our entire life is a search for the amplification of our power and well being. When I travel, I feel connected to a strength in me, that is amplified by the fluidity of the experience of travel. Once we find something that makes us feel this way, we know it and were compelled to listen and act accordingly.
Final Note
“Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before? who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense?” Walt Whitman (Vagabonding)
For years my life was internalized and processed by myself and my books. I isolated my experience so I could keep my subjective nonsense, and not be challenged by anything that can change my perspective on life.
Going out to the world is about testing your ideas, your nonsense. What is useful and what needs to be cut out. The sooner we start this inquiry, the better. If we wait too long, we lose flexibility, and the capacity to implement changes.
A year of solo traveling has successfully changed my personality.
Five years can give me the tools to create a completely different life.
This blog post is sharing the dialogue in the director room inside my head. Right now there is a board meeting going on there where everybody is asking: “he wants to change the entire script!? what??”
Yes :)
Let’s change the script.
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If you didn’t like this post: are you a dentist by any chance?(:
