3 Months After

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I am getting in a writing frenzy again. Been writing untill 3AM a few days ago, and I just felt like writing again as I logged in on this site, because I was curious to see if anyone had still been viewing it in the last few months. And yes people stumble upon my blog when looking for information about places they are going to. The entry about the Annapurna trekking is the most popular one. Just as I am writing this, and wondering about what season it would be now in Nepal, I realized I was one of these people preparing for a big adventure precisely a year ago. I left beginning of September, so I was definately counting down at this time last year. I was calculating my budget, shopping around for gear, and starting to pack my stuff in boxes. Exciting. Wondering what was awaiting me on such a long journey.

And now it's all over. Back to normal life. Just like you always get the same questions when people first meet you as a traveller, friends and people I meet are all saying the same things and asking the same questions now too. Is it strange to have to work again and have a normal life? Can you get used to it? You must have learnt so much. I would never have dared to do that. When are you going back? But after that, the conversation usually takes a turn to what's going on in their lives. And for most, life is pretty much the same as what it was before I left. They haven't changed, their lives haven't changed, their jobs are the same, the kids keep growing, the prices of gas are too high. Somehow I can't feel very connected to it all.

When I arrived in Belgium, I expected it to feel very strange. I remember it felt surrealistic the first weeks after being in Africa. Seeing Belgian roads again with Belgian-style road signs and direction boards. Seeing everybody rush from home to work and back. It took months to get used to not being in Africa. This time, everything felt abnormally normal. Yes, of course I was still travelling in my head (I still am), but it almost felt like I had never left. Everything here was exactly the way I left it. It only slowly occurred to me that something inside *me* has changed. It's not a change that surprises me though. It's only an enforcement of a change that was already going on. Sure, I hear everybody saying how I came back much stronger (but strength is not exactly what I lacked ; strength is sometimes a weakness). I definately feel a lot more self assured. That's nice, but the deeper change is how I look at the world and our place on it.

I had a goal when I went off. It didn't feel like fleeing to me (I know some people were convinced that it was only a flight of my problems). I knew I had to do this if I wanted to get out of the endless loops of my mind's logic. And I did. It took until November, until the Vipassana course to get out of the drama that captivated my mind. After Nepal, I almost felt like just returning, as I considered the target of the trip to be completed, and I *really* had had enough of India, and I started to feel lonely (after having had a great month with Rutger in the Himalaya's). Yet, something in me said it wasn't time to go home yet.

So I went on, back to India, then to Vietnam. Struggling hard with the loneliness, I met up with someone who happened to be struggling with the loneliness too. And who also just spent 3 months or so in India and was sick of it. And who worked in IT too. And a few more things that we had in common. We had long philosophical talks about our own lives and about the world's problems. Aside from the emotional aspect of me falling in love with the guy, this was the kind of conversation I needed. Good conversation is what we had both missed the most, I think. The talks helped me become aware of things that had already been brewing inside.

Of course, this must all sound very vague and poetic. It's hard to explain still. On one hand, I feel like I live in an episode of Friends or in a Sims game. The world around me is made up of people who all have their own illusions that they call truth. I am one of them. But I want to know the truth. That has been my quest since early childhood. So many things in my life have turned out to be sold to me as truth, while they were only other people's truths. I have never understood why people choose to believe their own lies. Eventhough I do catch myself doing it too, I still don't understand why, because I can't imagine not wanting to know the truth. I am not saying I am any better, I am just saying it is one of my big philosophical topics. But most people choose to live on without having to dig deeper. I am sure anyone who reads this will already be thinking that I just think too much. And that's probably "true".

The challenge is to find truth as opposed to people's (including my own) subjective truths. But that means I have to question everything other people tell me, and question everything I tell myself. Everything is only true as far as we perceive it. But our perception is entirely subjective, certainly not based on truth. Therefor, even our belief of "being" is very likely only what we want it to be. So if our perception of our "being" is wrong, then we are basically like actors in a movie. And that's how I feel these days. I already felt that way before I left, but it was a very dark feeling then. It isn't anymore now. I sort of accepted the idea that this life is only a movie that must be played to the end. I have become more of an observer suddenly. Equanimous. I see the world destructing itself, getting massively overpopulated, and at the same time I see myself and everyone around me running back and forth between work, shops and home, as if nothing is wrong. Business as usual. Each of us trying to build a future. Making plans for the next holiday. Worried about how the government will solve the inflation. Watching the weather reports and checking e-mail. Almost none of the things we do have anything to do with nature anymore. As if we've completely disconnected ourselves from nature. We're surrounded by buildings, cars, technology and advertising boards. An entirely self-fabricated world where everything is unnatural. We don't see food grow anymore, we don't see animals anymore. We see the end products: fruit, vegetables, bread, pasta, hamburgers, milk, eggs. We have time nor space left for nature. We have to be hyper efficient in order to sustain our fabricated world. We're not so far off George Orwell are we?

The more I discover that everything we believe is based on our own illusions, the less I feel connected to everything. If anything, I am still attached to my comforts, I like to feel financially secure, and I regret having the need to love and be loved. I am still holding on to my illusion of being in love with my fellow traveller, and I curse myself for it. It is just me wanting to hold on to something, wanting to believe it is real. It is only a movie for me, untill I can find truth. It sounds almost hindu, but I am not a religious person. I don't believe there is something we must worship, or else. I do believe we are part of something much bigger than we can ever comprehend. But us not knowing what we are part of, doesn't exclude it from being "true". I like to compare us with a spermazoid, or a protein, or a heart cell. Tiny things that cannot survive without their context (the heart for a heart cell for example), but can never understand the context. A heart cell will never know why the heart has to work so hard. It can never understand that the heart is the engine of a body hundreds times the size of the heart, and that the body (for us: the universe) is living independantly on a world with billions of other bodies, on a planet in a galaxy with millions of other planets. We can never understand what we are part of, so we tend to have to think we should not believe what we cannot see/feel/prove. The only unreal truth is exactly the things we see and feel, because we perceive it all in a subjective way.

Enough philosophy for now though. What the trip has done for me is that I am only more aware of how I see the world with different eyes. I can feel people see me with different eyes too. Maybe it's only a phase after which I will just adapt again and stop digging deeper. If not, I'm not quite sure yet what the next scene in the movie will look like. In other words, I haven't found direction yet. I tell myself I should just wait untill I have disconnected myself from the loverboy in my head before taking decisions. There still is a tiny little voice in me that stops me from moving on because there must be a way to get him to love me too. But my mind knows well enough that it's only my illusion. So what is it with these illusions? Why can't we just stop dreaming once we know it's an illusion? I have always been and will forever be looking for answers. My quest. The end of my movie will be an open ending. Only questions, no answers ;-)

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