Are we missing something?

Yesterday, when I reached home I found my mama and Papa completely lost in watching a travel show on NDTV GoodTimes . It reminded me that we were missing something badly. I sat quietly besides my papa, gave him a hug and said, ‘we still have to find a place where people don’t get hurt.’ He smiled and said, ‘Yes, we have to.’

Traveling is a means to satisfy my curiosity. My parents love traveling. Marvels of traveling have been experienced by people in different ways. But for us it is a way of finding ourselves or maybe forgetting ourselves. Papa always told me the need to know ourselves arises when one feels lost and that one should go back to the roots when one feels lost. 

When we are traveling, by default we forget the vicious circle of mundane concerns rooted deep in our lives. Our focus is automatically shifted to the roads, adventure, navigation, discovery and the destination. Like my dad, I have been a wanderer who always gets lost on the roads of life. But while traveling, it’s all fun. We let ourselves wander in all direction, errors of judgement are not of a concern and sometimes we just follow our guide trusting him completely. The best part of travelling is not just to discover a place but to know the stories behind that place and the way people proudly narrate the tales of their culture and heritage.

My preoccupation with musing is never at rest even when I am traveling but I am less evasive with myself when I travel. I am able to think beyond myself. At least when I am traveling, the place and the people become the nucleus of my life. It’s their stories that I am curious to know about, their history, their lifestyle, their language, the music, the food and the place is all that matters. The strangest thing about the stories is the theme. The beginning and the end of these stories might be different but the themes remain strikingly similar. Love, life, happiness, sadness, success, failure, hope, despair, and death; they are all the same, just presented in a different manner. With this fact comes a realization that the magnitude of problems faced by people might differ but problems will always be the same. Problems are omnipresent, there is no running away from it and that happiness and sadness, day and night are the two sides of the same coin, they go hand in hand. It comes in a package, a deal!

The enormous need to soak up everything that you see and capture every image in your mind, while traveling is ruined by the awful entity- ‘the time’. It curtails all the pleasure and the curiosity of knowing and arriving at something. My hard luck, I always feel I am running short of time. By the time I get familiar to the place, it's time to say goodbye. Lisa St. Aubin de Terán's quote comes to my mind which goes like 'traveling is like flirting with life, it's like saying, I would stay and love you but I have to go; this is my station!" Time is never enough. 

Traveling is an unalloyed pleasure and what is gratifying is miseries don’t multiply when you are traveling. For some moments, I am detached from myself. I am made free from those self indulgent outburst and the melancholic feeds that I am accustomed to. Why not travel a bit, if it brings so much of good in return. It brings a fresh lease to my life. Get cape, wear cape and fly! We are surely missing something, we need to get lost, so that we can accept ourselves, the way we are, without any alterations when we find ourselves.