How does it feel to leave everything behind, to fold up one‘s tents, as people like to say? How does it feel to leave behind friends and family for an uncertain period of time, to turn your back on your homeland? How does it feel to give up all the securities of our first world lifestyle, just to plunge into a pool of foreign cultures with which the plain interaction often mostly fails because of the language barrier? Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you extremely excited, unspeakably nervous? Both of us asked ourselves these questions so many times in the little periods of time when not all of our time was consumed by the planning and organization for this trip, we spend some time wondering if we shouldn’t be more afraid, if it shouldn’t hurt way more to sell all of our belongings for which we worked so hard in the past few years? And at an estimated 11.000 meters above the ground these questions seem completely irrelevant. So many questions, not only the ones we asked ourselves, but also the ones we‘ve been asked by friends and family, so many chances to become insecure about what we intended to do, but we did not.
We‘ve been waiting in vain, the fear and the doubt never came, not even as we finally boarded the plane and lost contact to our native soil, without a return ticket, off into the the unknown for an indefinite period of time. Without wanting to one always has a lot of expectations and unsolicitedly our fellows always put many expectations upon us, without bad intentions for sure, what to expect from the unexpected anyways? And still it seemed like nobody believed us when we said that we were only seldomly plagued by sincere doubts. Minor panic attacks came sudden, in small periods of rest, these rare few minutes in which we weren’t absorbed in our plannings and preparations, way ahead of the body who stayed at home with the unsteady mind. But eventually these moments passed, like small shadows which scurried across the worried mind only to gnaw at our firm convictions, to nourish themselves with doubt, but this hunger remained unappeased. And so we had to disappoint our friends and family who expected us to be afraid or worried.
It’s the same with feelings, one cannot measure, arrange or force them even though sometimes we wish to. Like all these other things in life that are not intangible, feelings of any kind are subjective. Everybody feels in a different way, everybody in a different intensity. The most valuable feelings of all are the ones that can be shared, when you are united in the way you feel about a certain intention. And while all of the people around us agreed on the fact that we were a little odd not to worry about what was ahead of us, from the very start we were united even more by the assurance that we had taken the perfect way for ourselves. And this is maybe what most of our friends and family certified us as “courage“ because in the end there’s simply no need to be courageous when you are perfectly sure that the decision you made is the right one. Doubts and fears are certainly constant companions of every big decision, but if you realize that this weird shoe that you’ve taken off the shelf and tried on fits you and that you moreover work perfectly well together as this bold pair of shoes then you can be quite hopeful that the long way ahead can be accomplished together unscathed.
For sure we do worry about the future, everybody does every day. From earth-shattering matters such as the devastating effects that climate change and overpopulation will have on us and future generations to everyday matters such as your success in a job interview or if you’ve chosen the right partner in life; nothing is safe, but everything’s possible. And instead of being consumed by worries which life throws at you anyways like small obstacles, we should more often take and be fond of the opportunities that life holds for us. In opposition to the majority of people in this whole wide world we have the chance to retrace the steps of our nomadic ancestors and see the shady sides and the treasures that this world has to offer with our own eyes without being held back by carrying too many belongings. There will be good and bad times and without doubt there will be days when we will question if this was the right thing to do, when we are pushed to the boundaries of our own experiences and capacities. But this project is our opportunity to grow, not only within our minds, but also within our hearts and we really appreciate this privilege. This is a huge thank you for all of these friends and family members whose support and care made our step into the wide world so much easier, without you this project would have been so much harder to implement.