Slow Travel
Time moves differently when travelling.
I tend to forget how short time 4 months is in your regular day-to-day life. Nothing really happens during such a short period, especially during autumn and winter seasons. Meanwhile as we have been travelling for the same period, it feels like we have lived a thousand lives.
We spent three weeks on a Meditation Retreat in the northern parts of Thailand, laid down at the beaches of Koh Kood for two weeks and travelled on a motorbike for a week at Ha Giang Loop in Vietnam.
All the places represent very different trips with different lifestyles, moods and financial requirements. It’s like we weren’t even the same people at the night life of Pattaya and in the rice fields of North-Vietnam. But it has all happened in less than 16 weeks.
On a short vacation it’s easy to have this mentality of rush – of having to run from a place to another, see everything and everyone and enjoy of every second so you don’t miss even the smallest moment.
I had FOMO for the first month. It just felt that we had not seen anything and that while sitting down our life would just drive by. That somehow, we would miss everything and as the moment of departure came I felt the need to come back in the future to fulfill the missed parts.
But the truth is that with that mentality you’ll never have enough time. It’s not about the amount of time, it’s about the attitude towards it.
One can spend years travelling around visiting the 194 countries of the world and still feel like life is moving too fast, like missing out on everything cool, always being in the wrong place at the wrong time or already living the next destination through planning. Soon, nothing brings satisfaction, no experience can be enjoyed as there’s always something to be missed too. In the end one can boast about visiting all the continents and still feel like having accomplished nothing and whether a long-term traveler or a tourist on a 2-week-vacation – one can feel that travelling is as stressful as daily life.
Slow Travel is becoming a megatrend for a reason: By doing less, you can experience more.
xx
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Slow travel also better supports our system 2. I am referring to Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman´s book Thinking Fast and Slow. Slow travel gives us time to absorb the surroundings, concentrate, pay attention and “compute” the experiences we face. Fast travel is also ok, but there our system 1 mainly creates endless list of short moments and immediate impressions. We don´t have time to create understanding and deeper relation to what we see and experience.
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