I always see traveling a bit like wine tasting, because with wine, you will recognize flavors, smells, and different registries that you are familiar with, and when you visit places or explore things, somehow, your brain scans the database of the spots you have been or seen, to find similarities to where you are now. We like to compare to things that we know, basically to put things in perspective, and that, being for ourselves, or even to explain to someone what the place we are in, looks like, so they can relate in some form, and “travel” to us through something they know. Even when we face something new, we immediately try to slice it into pieces, until we find a match for each of the pieces so we can say, “you know, it is like that place but with green mountains.” And there is nothing wrong with it, and I’m sure it sort of follows a pattern of human behavior in our relationship with the environment. But I want to go a step further, the comparison effort works beautifully and comes out naturally when we control what’s around us, and what I mean by that is like walking in a city, or driving through the coast of farmland, is a matter of scale, when our surroundings are at a scale to which we relate to, then we still have control over the experience in that sense. But those unique moments when we manage to arrive at the top of a mountain or are in the middle of a canyon, or an ancestral forest, those moments where we know that the single photo we can take will not make justice to what you are experiencing, in those is when you don’t compare, but still somehow have an internal fight that makes you want to possess that moment, to seal in some form that memory, that place, but is just too big, too grandiose, and the best thing you can do, is to sit back, and simply flow, enjoy your a-ha moment where you just connect as a small human being with that vast and incredible wonder of nature because that exchange of energy is the better gift you can take with you.

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2021