I have a friend, who says that every time he travels, instead of going to familiar places, it has to always be a place he has never seen before. And other than the occasional visit to his family in Spain he actually goes through with it. This surely has it´s perks and brings a lot of excitement, yet I feel it can be quite exhausting at times as well.
If you are working full time it is special to get some time off. Of course it would be exciting to always visit a place you have never been to before, but ultimately it requires a lot of time and energy. You have to prepare the trip much more thoroughly since you do not know your way around, most likely don´t know the culture, let alone the history of the place.
Don´t get me wrong, I fully support seeing as much of the world as possible and confronting oneself with at least one new country/culture a year to broaden your horizon and your perspective, but I feel, it needs a measure. I feel, visiting familiar places can give you a lot of pleasure and peace of heart, too, yet is absolutely underrated.
Travelling to places you know and love can give you the freedom to just be and enjoy, rather than having that pressure on you to see everything. You have the opportunity to decelerate and dive deeper in a place or culture. Just sit down and watch life go by.
These days there is so much social exhibitionism. People posting pictures of every little aspect of their lifes and travels on instagram and facebook, expecting either conciously or unconciously approval for ones actions. “Look where I´ve been this month”, “Look how posh I am, being able to travel to this place” is the impression one gets these pictures want to tell you. Showing one year the same pictures as the year before would be just lame, let alone travelling to the same place twice in one year? How could you?
Let´s travel back to familiar places and let go of this peer pressure and need for approval. Enjoy life at a place you know and are comfortable with and you may manage to create more worthwhile stories to tell upon your return than just that you have been somewhere, but hardly saw anything because you were in such a hurry to tick everything off your list of things to do.
Travelling to familiar places can also bring back happy memories of previous visits. You can relive past visits and in spirit re-connect with the people you were there with
Last year, for example, I had the luck to travel to Passignano sul Trasimeno, a little town in Umbria, Italy, for the first time in years. If asked, most people would not even imagine where this is, but I used to travel there for many years every August for the full month. My family would meet there and while the parents were relaxing the kids would entertain each other.
Re-visiting this place of my childhood had an interesting effect. While very much realising how much time had passed I at the same time felt like the time had stood still for so many years. One strong association I have with this place is spending time with my uncle, who is not with us anymore, so being there made me feel his presence again more then since the day he had passed. Not in a creepy way, just appreciating having had such an amazing person in my life and appreciating life itself.
Do you have a place like this in your life? A home away from home? A place where you can be yourself without any ifs, buts and whys? When have you been there last and what was your experience?
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