“It might be youth. It might be the reptilian impulses of a species with migration encoded in its DNA. It might be your inferiority complex or the boredom of small-town claustrophobia or the exhibitionist streak you’ve never told anyone about. It might be the hungers of ancestors whose aspirations have sunk into your bones, pushing you to go. It might be loneliness. It might be your inexplicable attraction to “bad boys” or the still unknown thrill of transgression and the hope of feeling something. It might be the self-loathing that has always been so weirdly bound up with a spiritual yearning. It might be the search for a mother, or a father, or yourself. It might be greed or curiosity. It might be liberation or escape. It might be a million other reasons, but we all leave.”*
“You can leave without a bus ticket, of course. You can depart in your heart and take an existential journey to anywhere but the “here”… We leave because we’re looking. For something. For someone. We leave because we long for something else, something more. We leave to look for some piece of us that’s missing. Or we hit the road to leave ourselves behind and refashion who we are. We hit the road in the hope of finding what we’re looking for—or at least sufficiently distracting ourselves from the hungers and haunting absences that propelled our departure in the first place.”*
And you, fellow traveller, what are you looking for?
keep exploring!
*Smith, James K. A. (2019). On the Road with Saint Augustine. Baker Publishing Group.
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