Wanderlust: if i had known before..

mikitaly (80)in #travel • 9 years ago

After having introduced myself, here I am: it's time for my very first post so let me apologize in advance if I appear too confident but I thought to write just a little bit more about me. I lived my whole life with a feeling of restlessness, thinking that was due to the normal human condition. Then the Science of Wanderlust has begun to spread and the eternal traveler syndrome could finally have a name.
If I had known before about Wanderlust all my worries could have been labeled in a single definition and to all those who told me, when I was young, that I had to settle down to find peace of mind I could have said that my restlessness wasn't wrong. Ok I changed in 10 years 6 different cities but today I have the DRD4-R7 Gene to blame, the Wanderlust Gene identified in people who generally embrace movement, change, and adventure. And in the end I even tried to settle down since in the meantime I had my pretty family and for some years I really believed to be healed.
But..nothing doing!
As a bill that expires, here it was again the desire to leave everything and looking for my Neverland, and in a few months with my daughters of 3 and 5 years old and a husband with my own symptoms, we found ourselves even in another continent, in Africa. We moved to Kenya: my Wanderlust's collateral effects.
Yes because I couldn't imagine that a place is able to let you passively accept each symptom and condition of this soul disease. Impossible to imagine but sometimes you can find nothing special and all you need just in a place.
And what place!! Of those that aren't about the places you're used to.
Actually the initial impact with a deeply different country from Western standards we are accustomed to, it can be devastating. It can blur your senses and making you to perceive a distorted reality that is difficult to understand as long as you continue to use the western society as a comparison term. But when you enter the mechanism becoming part of the gears, then all the paradoxes, which characterize the developing economies of the African countries, they won't surprise you anymore.

After four years I learned that as a guest in another country people have to open themselves to the new, without denying their own habits but welcoming the traditions of the culture in force.
The only rule to follow is not to presume to know more just because you are Westerners but let yourself go to the slow rhythms of the African POLE POLE : that is going flat.
What that happened to me. I slowed down and I reborn. And now that I haven't lived in Kenya for almost 3 years, I've still not been able to explain all of its paradoxes: skyscrapers in Nairobi but also villages within the country with no drinking water or to see a Masai warrior in the savannah with the latest generation of smartphone.

No I don't know how it's possible that system still remains standing. But one thing I learned, of course a different way of seeing my life. Maybe having lived in a small town where only the main road is paved and the others are in clay and often during the week there is no power or water all day, all things we used to take it for granted, maybe it showed me another way of seeing life or just in a different light. I know it's difficult to understand as long as we don't take a break from our chaotic life that never gives us time to stop and reflect on all around us. I mean, we don't need to arrive in Africa to return to appreciate the simple things in life, every once in a while, we just need to power down finding a bit of time for ourselves.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm still at square one since I've moved to Italy and the Wanderlust' symptoms are back again.
I know all you can tell me is just trying to hang in there. :-D