My first overseas trip was to America, and it was also the first visa affixed to my first passport.. You get up and go to America and one of the things you buy is an oyster shell! I wonder where those oyster shells are?
Are they still in boxes in my mother’s basement with some of my other loved ones? Are they broken by their sensitivity, or are they living in a moment where not being touched means being safe?. This was the reason behind my transfer to Izmir from a relatively small city, as I love what city life brings.. A more organized and developed city. After a busy and stressful work day, I would leave all the troubles behind by going to my house where I set up my order and walking through that door.. Even the things in the house were always neat and in order.
So much so that I would do my own thing without the need for a cleaner to come to the house to maintain this order.. For the spouse who came to visit the house, they were surprised that the order of the house was far from a bachelor’s house.. I didn’t need to do much for this, in fact, if you like order, you like to be organized.
When I carried out my work in order, the work I would do at home decreased to that extent.. Dusting the house, watering the flowers, brushing my cat, cooking, laundry and ironing… It’s all a distant memory now. The more things you owned, the harder it was to organize them.. A three bedroom living room house is sometimes small for me, living alone. While it is difficult to put clothes in the 6-door wardrobe, dresser and nightstands, it is now easier to live with just my backpack and place all my belongings in it.
As someone who likes order. I’m more organized now. You ask why? Because I needed other things to organize what I had to be in order or to put it in order. Wardrobe for dozens of suits and shirts, dressers and nightstands for dozens of socks and laundry. I had to have other things to keep what I had.. As the number of these increases, the order of the person gets harder.
Tomorrow, after a nine-hour bus ride, I will be in another city and it took me 15 minutes to go and collect my things before I write these lines.. Come on, move it from place to place? How soon will you be able to pack up and settle in? Is it to be settled in order or “to be on the go”? How many clothes do you still keep in your wardrobe that you haven’t touched in the last year?
In other words, I guess behind our desire for order is to belong somewhere.. This can be a city, neighborhood, street, house or even a corner of the house.. We like to belong somewhere, to enter familiar faces, to shop at our favorite market.. We go to the cafe we love and order the cake and coffee we know the taste of.
We eat the food we like at the restaurant we love.. In fact, these places we love also have tables that we love.. When we go to these places, we always like to be at those tables, we can even choose a chair in the special corner of the table.. Because we liked it once, and is it the desire to always remember and live that pleasant moment?. It’s nice to take your cat in your arms and caress, or your loved one…
All these beautiful things are also our habits.. We’re used to it because we know what it is, we know what it is, and that’s why we have those habits. In the order of our lives, which are already surrounded by borders, perhaps the moment we feel most free is when we can live those habits we have.. Who knows that but us? This also creates a cycle for the moment of enjoying life.
When we look back, we realize that we have swerved between these habits with clear boundaries and that our lives are monotonous and ordinary. Don’t we?
Perhaps this is what lies behind the concept we call boredom.. If you are a bored person, could it be because you did not do something or something different? This order we have established becomes our shelter when we are bored with something or when we have a hard day.. However, sometimes for no reason, we can get bored in the place that is our shelter while living this whole habit cycle.. We keep doing/living the same things all the time because. Boredom begins when we realize this. Same house, same furniture arrangement, same environments, same friends, same habits.
Me? What could bother me except people? Oh, and a cruel, ruthless, unfair business world.. Boring myself except for realistic reasons is torturing myself.. Why should I do this? For now, the business world is in the garbage, so the things that can annoy me are far away. Apart from that, I am bored throughout my life. I wonder how many times I have said a sentence like what should I do, it is not even as much as the fingers of a hand.
The truth is that people lie behind our unhappiness, and in the same way, our happiness.. Unless, of course, we have yet acquired the ability to learn to be happy on our own, which requires a long lifetime of experience.. If our happiness depends on people, it means we are in a roulette game, we live whatever happens to our luck.
So what happened, am I now running away from people, or, as I say, alienating, and guaranteeing my happiness by going on the road? Both yes and no. It was so easy to run from people before hitting the road. It was enough to throw myself into the house and shut the door.. If you are a part of a system, the only place you can control it is your home within that system area.
This also leads to the same door, home equals escape, in an optimistic word, shelter.. It was an easy job for me.. Because it was behind that door that I could enjoy life without anyone else.
Now I’m right inside people. I am now in the home of a tribe in a village house, now in the home of a city dweller living in a luxury apartment in a modern city of the twentieth century.. So much so that I am among all kinds of people, colorful, chirping.. I discovered the magic of hearing and discovering different sounds from the sounds your ear is used to in my previous short European vacations.. For me, the alienation on the path I set out to become alienated is not escape, it means adding these new colors to the old information.. That’s what it means to be on the road. Alienating your past and filling the moment with new colors. I think this will be the subject of another article.
Loving is hard work, not being able to see and touch your loved ones is more difficult.. When we lose a lot of things we have, it may not be very difficult to replace them.. When it comes to love, to love and to be loved, and even more so when it comes to love, even the flowing waters stand before him.. I think the feeling of belonging lies behind our desire to be close to our loved ones.. This is one of the hardest parts of being on the road.. This is where patience comes in.
For someone who can be happy on their own, loving, being loved and feeling love is a plus, but there is always a risk where there is love, and that risk is losing it.. When we look back at our past, we find ourselves having already experienced and perhaps learned this thing we call difficult.. We loved, we were loved, we fell in love, we left or we were abandoned, they must have taught us something.. How long must we have lived if we haven’t learned yet. We need to learn to understand, not to run away from fear.. When one learns this, it becomes neither difficult to love nor to be alone.. How often do we see it over the years?. Distances are reset with just a few keystrokes on the phone, but how often do we get together with our family face to face? Being close to our loved ones should not be measured by distance, but by heart distance.
Even though I am at the other end of the world, even if I drag myself from one city to another, from one country to another, even if I cannot touch my loved ones, it is enough for me to feel right now.. While some of us have to “necessarily” hurl ourselves away from their loved ones because of work and bread, I prefer to “voluntarily” be “on the road”.
In the past, I was more than a thousand kilometers away from my family, now maybe fifteen. thousand, but nothing changes. To love is just to love, without the distance. Touching is of course the most beautiful thing.
Being on the road is a journey of discovery for me.. When you first understand the layout of a place you go to and adapt yourself to that order, your sense of belonging starts to bloom for this place.. Your flexibility and adaptability reach the top and develop you.
The trace you leave wherever you go, the trace left by that place on you makes you you, it teaches you.. While you are drifting on the roads, the number of people you meet, meet and understand increases, these people you will love and miss in their absence, keep the feeling of love in you always alive.. You become more fond of your loved ones.
It is exciting to be thrown around as someone who loves order.. As a person with a strong sense of belonging, I don’t limit it only to home and city, I feel a sense of belonging to the world.. Everywhere is me, home is where I unpack my backpack. we can all do this. just need to learn. I threw myself far away from my oyster shells while learning. Even though I’m thousands of kilometers away from him, I know well that my mind is stuck on him.. Do they stay where I left them?
Day: 433, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Borneo