“I’m not gonna say what we’re doing or where we’re going,” my friend told me, and I got increasingly confused as we got on the tram, went to the outskirts of the city, got off on the stop next to a tiny lake (??) and just walked walked walked.
And then we came to a place where you could buy Christmas trees!! She bought one for me. It was the sweetest thing. I’m staying in Germany for Christmas instead of going home to Sweden, and now there’s a tree in our apartment 🖤🖤
2015.19.21 11.16 Â I don’t feel a lot about leaving. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m so inspired for the rest of my life to continue, inspiration usually comes after travel, but maybe because I’ve been here so long, it has already managed to sink in.
15.30 This is not sad, because this is not going home, it’s travelling to yet another place and then you go somewhere else from there.
16.04 I’ve never been interested in finding myself, I think while on the bathroom at Lusaka airport. If I was, I think airports would be a good place to look.
Anyway.
I read about bicycling in the magazine on the plane, and while sitting here it makes me want to be on a bike instead, inhaling fresh air, seeing bright colours and feeling my muscles work. I want to travel by my own strength. Maybe not far, but at least a walk through the woods when I get home.
20.50 At the airport in Addis Ababa. It’s a good one. If I were to travel the world I think I’d like it here. It’s not too big, but not small enough to not feel international. People of different cultures everywhere, the most beautiful Ethiopian scarves in the gift shops and a prayer room at the end of the corridor. The cafés are crowded as well, and they remind me of how the streets outside might be (not as if I know that) with traditional coffee making and people laughing.
Also they have these chairs everywhere that you can lean back in so they become almost like beds. When we finally found an unoccupied one (and now we found two more) I left my bags there and went to look around. I must have looked a bit strange. With no luggage, taking really slow steps and just walking around looking with a blank expression and soul far away in some way, while still being very present, maybe the deepest form of present, because I’m aware that I am. And maybe the least deep form. Then again, no one was probably looking at me.
I’ve been living in that good place in my head ever since I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and it changed me in the way good art does. It was beautiful, and inspiring, and maybe actually the sort of thing you should watch before you travel, and I knew of it because of a song from the soundtrack that my dance group danced to once. In the movie they played it during the credits and I just leaned back and listened to it while the lights of Addis Ababa closed in underneath our wings. White lights from buildings and yellow from the vein-like streets. Yes.
Sometimes I get so wrapped up in things I want to do and feel like doing and don’t feel like doing and kinda have to anyway, that I forget to stop thinking. I forget to feel life, and start to experience it simply with my mind. And then I’m suddenly shaken alive, God wakes my soul up, and so I go back to feeling. I feel everything and it’s like having an additional sense. Or bigger than that, like the way I normally go around, thinking about stuff and experiencing them with all my senses, is fine. But what a poor way to live. And when I go back to happiness that warms my heart and tears that wrecks it, it’s like all my senses had lost their meaning until now when my heart feels what it knows so it can believe it.
eirians 