Fernweh, sketch by nadeesi

When you choose to live your life on the road, of course leaving your family and old friends is a compromise, a struggle that you deal with almost every day as you move forward and explore. People will say, “Your travels are lovely but don’t you miss your loved ones – the people who truly care about you?” You will nod your head and agree and imagine what it would be like to return to the comfort of their presence.

But nobody tells you about the people you will love along the way.

This type of love has nothing to do with romance. This love is free from possession, jealousy, and attachment. This love is not about creating relationships but about simply and naturally relating to the smiles on the faces of new and beautiful people with unique minds, bodies, and eye colors.
Nobody prepares you for this kind of love that enters your life on a giant wave of truth-telling and human connectedness. A wave that retreats just as fast as it washed over you and almost swallowed you whole.

This is why you must learn how to swim.

These new loves will drown you in their wake as they fade into the distance if you cannot manage to tread the water around you. But these loves remain, fixed on the horizon. For it is you that is moving forward, away from the souls who sprinkled a bit of fresh light into your precious existence. Of course you consider staying – loving even deeper and longer than you planned. But you didn’t plan any of this and you know there are more loves waiting for you. They are out there is every city and town and farm. There are small cracks in their beings, waiting to be filled by the experience of you.

This is the dilemma, stay with the ones who you have now come to love or sigue caminando, continue walking, in the direction of new experiences and faces. Nobody warns you about the heaviness of your heart as you turn your cheek for the last time, away from your past and towards your future. Nobody tells you that as much as your imagination carries this present moment with you, manipulating and molding it as you envision the day you return to these people and smile into each other’s eyes, that you most likely will never see them again. That all you will be left with are empty hands and a full heart. A broken but well-loved heart that, with time, is always ready to continue loving, over and over again.

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Written by Saskia Layden

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