"travel far enough, you meet yourself."

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” 

-e.e.cummings

 I love reading and poetry in particular is something that always touches my heart. Recently I am exploring the powerful words of E. E. Cummings and I have been strucked by his poems.   

This quote in particular really inspired me, because I've been thinking a lot about myself in these last 7 months of my life and I discovered new things, learned, changed and found myself as it never happened to me before. So it's really true that travelling you find yourself, because of what you see, what you experience, but mostly because of who you meet. People have an incredible power over us, they can bring us down or they can make us rise, even with just some simple words, or some underestimated actions. And when you have been sinked by somebody, it's harder to be brought back to the surface. This is why we need people around us. I believe it's in the human nature to surround ourselves with other people. Because it's important to find out who we are, and believe in ourselves, but there's no way to do that alone.

Chris McCandless last thought was "happiness is only real when shared." And I've never felt it more true than now. Now that I find myself surrounded by amazing friends from different parts of the world, who grew up in completely different ways and ended up all in the same place together. All those people that I had the honor to meet became important, and I established strong bounds with them. They are not only my friends, they became my family. Because that's what happens when you travel, when you do it for real. You don't only make your mind and your world bigger, you open yourself to others and you make your family bigger.   

It doesn't take much. Because when you are alone you hang on every little act of kindness you find. And soon enough, those things become more and more important, and then you find yourself revealing what are your deepest fears and aspirations, what keeps you up at night and what you dream about when you are awake. And that's how you know people, that's how you help them from sinking. Even just by listening you're making a big difference into someone's life. And once that the person starts to build up themselves again, when they start to breathe out in the open air at the surface, they will start looking for something bigger, looking at the sky and wondering. Spending time asking things they never asked themselves before. That's how life is made. That's how we find ourselves. With others.
And the more I realize how important these people are to me, the more I wish I could stay with them forever. But I also miss home. I miss who taught me how to fly. And when I will be home again, I will miss who drag me back to the surface when I fell down. Who taught me how to save myself. That's the most precious and hard thing about travelling, and not only about being an exchange student. You have the best and the worst of both worlds. And you want it all. You are constantly divided between two parts of yourself, two homes, but one big family. And you learn to live with it. Because once your horizons are expanded, once you jumped out of your comfort zone, once you lost sight of the shore...there's no coming back. You're not going to be the same ever again. Because that is why you travel, to come home changed. And I always repeat it to myself, because it's the most valuable thing I learned in the last few months.
Life is fast, it flies away at an incalculable speed and soon enough we will all be dust blowing in the wind and no one will remember us, because entropy increases and oblivion is inevitable, and we shall hang on everything we get into this fast, mad, and dark chaos. Because wathever works is what makes us happy. That's what makes us worth it. Mostly it's a matter of luck, coincidence, destiny, fate, karma or wathever you want to call it. We don't have a purpose, we have a chance. So we better use it.