Backpacking for Life: What or Why?

Having a light backpack helps turn the focus on the essence of traveling and its pleasures, facilitating to discover new places that can only be reached by foot, allowing for itinerary changes anytime; most important, it boosts the genuine old friendships and incentives new connections since the only interest is just enjoying, being, meeting, and sharing. But, while traveling, I many times wondered why it is so hard to transfer it to everyday life.

Accumulating is a very common human practice as it brings certain security (or pseudo-security) because ‘possessing’ provides with a sense of having reality under control by silencing uncertainty and self-consciousness with momentary tasty snacks that bring the sensation of fullness. Culture incentives for accumulating all type of material objects  making them accessible at low costs and endless installments, accumulating as many ‘friends’ as possible as in Facebook and Twitter, accumulating tasks and activities that bring social status, accumulating dreams for after retirement. But, do our things, emotions, and relationships help us grow and expand?

Throughout the trip, I had to often stop to make room in the backpack. It was inevitable to compare this process with life backpacking, and asked myself about what relationships were genuine and contributed to live more meaningful.  It was not an easy task to decide what to keep, what to renew, and what to let go; certain things seemed to be very useful and many others were hard to leave out due to the emotional attachment. Why is it sometimes so difficult to make happier decisions, to establish authentic relationships, and keep healthy options? 

Identifying what is only attractive and brings momentary exaltation requires time, energy, self-transparency, and even painful looks to face, move, clean, store or let go. Unconsciously, it is tempting to respond to fear and manipulate our own reality to reassure ourselves that what we have is what we need.  So, how to realize what makes the life backpack heavier and set us off to wander? And, how to recognize what makes us feel truly alive?

Well-being and completeness feed from mindful choices and positive quality of interactions with ourselves, reality, and people that are far from limiting our potentials; on the contrary, they carry a priceless bliss that nourishes on trust, care, and rapport. And, the emotions felt are unforgettable, irreplaceable, and replenish us in curious ways, empowering the self to mature, to create, to transform, to act with heart.

Perhaps, instead of asking what things we fill our lives with, we should ask ourselves why we put those things in our lives.

Like backpacking, the task starts by creating spaces and fearlessly inhabiting them.

“We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.”  -Viktor E. Frankl

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