Every spring the swedes wake up again after their mental hibernation. In the dark and cold winter time they all stay indoors and are kind of half-dead. They go to work, they go to bars sometimes but mostly they stay inside watching television. They are always on auto-pilot and you rarely see them smile or laugh. To be honest with you, they’re just trying to survive the winter. Everyone long for the spring and summer. You hear them complain about the weather all the time and in the month of March they just can’t handle another snow storm. They tell each other “soon the spring must come!”
I know I’m Swedish, but I see everything from another perspective. I’ve been traveling a lot, I’ve seen the world, that’s something that changes everything. I’m not like them, but sometimes I pretend. There’s no going back after you’ve seen the world. They say that you don’t really know your own culture until you’ve really experienced another culture. I’ve really seen other cultures, and that’s how I got to know my own culture. They laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at them because they don’t understand. I don’t belong here anymore, I’m a stranger and an outsider in my own country. I don’t belong anywhere.
When you’ve grown up and spent your whole life in a country something happens to you. That’s all you know, that’s reality for you. And some weeks in Spain for your vacation, lying on the beach all the time won’t change that fact. Some weekends in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or whatever won’t change that fact.
There are so many different ways of traveling. You can focus on so many different things. If you want to go for a weekend to Paris and visit all the museums and all that, fine, do it! I don’t have a problem with that kind of traveling, do it your way. But don’t come to me and tell me that you’ve seen the world! True traveling for me is spending long time in another country, trying to learn about their culture, trying to understand their way of thinking, to get deep down in their psyche. That’s true traveling for me, but I respect your way of traveling if you respect my style of traveling.
Traveling is all about expanding your consciousness. To learn things about life and humanity. To see the world in another way. To see your own culture in another way. And there’s never no going back from that type of traveling. You have changed your perception of everything, deep and permanently. If you want your soul to evolve fast, go backpacking around the world. A part of you will never come back home. A part of you will die. That’s inevitable. But it’s okay. That old part of you that died needed to die, and made room for something new and better.
In the end of the day it all comes down to one question: waiting for the sun or chasing the sun?
Blessings! <3