There is no time to slow down, and yet we are moving too slowly. Impressions are flooding in faster than we can adequately process them, but we reach for more. Our short pauses are for physical recuperation, not for reflecting on what we are taking in. We have been to six countries in the past week and walked over 70 miles within them. We have slept in five different apartments spread out between as many cities. We intend to remain relentless in maximizing the effect of blitzing the senses with a constant barrage of novelty.
Our way of traveling may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the way I see it, this is like reading a book where my eyes absorb word after word, and over time, the sequence unfolds with a story being exposed to me, though while in the first chapters, much of what will happen is yet to occur and little is apparent. A good adventure should deliver a long and sometimes convoluted story filled with exotic details and characters whose nuances keep us mystified and intrigued until, somewhere in the final chapters, it all starts to make sense. Until then, persist and collect further details as you grow familiar with the plot. This is a journey that I hope will continue to feed my imagination from the impressions made for years to come, just as my favorite books have done.
Vacations shouldn’t always be a simple break from the daily routine; they can also be enigmas and treasure chests that lend tall tales and riches that can be experienced in bits and pieces for the rest of our lives. The photographic record and the rare words I’m able to find along the trail are the strings of popcorn to memories that might otherwise fade without these helpers.
Our lives are not pop culture, and the major milestones and markers should not be other people’s dramas and comedies. We do have the ability to forge personas based on the makeup we have gone out and collected actively, as opposed to having banality smudged upon our faces while we have not learned how to invite uniqueness into our experiences. Taking an active role in reading, talking, traveling, and learning is difficult and fraught with failure compared to the ease of watching TV, playing video games, and trying to survive on junk food, both literally and figuratively.
So we race forward. Back home, we read, read, and read some more. We read to gather history, to expand our vocabulary, to feed our dreams of things we’ve not seen but are allowed to imagine. Then we travel, and we once again gather history, expand our vocabulary, and feed our dreams while having the images delivered firsthand to our memories.
Every moment out here in a place we are unfamiliar with is only worth as much as we are able to interpret it. When we encounter a word we do not understand, we don’t close the book and only look for tomes where we know all the words; we open a dictionary and learn something new. Likewise, when we find a food item we’ve not tried, we do not walk away; we try it and attempt to know something about it. Should I come upon a 15th-century red marble relic from a palace I may never have thought I wanted to see, I embrace that its image is now a part of who I am, and in the future, should I be reading a book about Hungary from five hundred years ago I might have a reference point and connection that would have otherwise not been there.
Voracious could be the word used to describe our attitude to taking on this journey across Europe. Like a great book, we will not want to put it down as we approach the end, but we will look forward to what comes next as we are old enough to now know that it’s okay to embrace different subject matter where the next title might be more compelling than the last. Life and sharing conversations will help fill in the gaps as another piece of the human puzzle starts to be understood in some small way. To do this, we must find enough persistence to persevere in a quest to know more.
We’ve met very few like us, but we’ve met enough to know we are not alone in the hunger for cultural and intellectual knowledge that extends beyond the mundane.