The first reason of travelling was to run away
Updated: Aug 16, 2019
#runaway #adventure #travellingalone #boyscouts
I was born in the North of Spain, because my parents were there at that moment, but they are not from there either. After one year, we moved to live to the South, and one week after I became 15, we moved to live to Venezuela for one and a half years, then moving back to Spain, this time to the centre of the country, where I lived another 10 years, before starting my whole adventure.
Growing up I always dreamt in travelling, in not being at home. Actually, in not even having a home. Home would be my #rucksack. Like a snail.
As a child, I just loved the freedom of being not at home, of being alone somewhere, where I would confront myself with the difficulties of the "and now what?". I had an extremely difficult #childhood, but I'm very thankful for that.
Because that pushed me to be away, and taught me to be #independent and learn to defend myself in all circumstances. Nobody would ever help me no matter what I was going through and my #neurons had to wire already themselves into the survival mode, which helped me enormously later in my life.
It could take only few seconds to take decisions because I had to do it already as a child. Meaning, my #intuition had to develop to help me, and for some reason, I was always connected to it and didn't let my brain to play the boss, but my guts. They would tell me what, where, to whom to trust.
Of course, as a child, I had first to learn and still I trusted a couple of people I should not have trusted, before learning the relationship between my feelings and the results.
I went to some Summer camps with the catholic church but starting in the pre-adolescent I joined the Boy-Scouts (which in Spain are male and female together) and went also some weekends on excursions, and I loved that freedom. I loved how much is out there to learn. And with 14 years old I decided to go one weekend alone to the countryside with no tent and no food. Only with a knife to construct myself a shelter to sleep in the night and to cut some herbs or plants to eat. My mother thought I went with the group.
And I would say, that was the point when I discover the beauty of being alone in communion with the nature. It was so amazing that I decided that would me my way of life: being free.
When later we went to Venezuela I enjoyed few days with friends travelling hitch kicking to the lake of Maracaibo. We were all teenagers, but that experience of #freedom gave more "wood to my fire" of starting to get addicted to that feeling of travelling.
Unfortunately, we had to go back to Spain and I had to live for the first time in a flat. I wanted desperately to get an education. People thought it was to get a job afterwards and to live a life like everyone else, but that was not my intention. I wanted to have a training in something, so that I could work in wherever country I would be.
The first 7 years in that city in the centre of Spain were really terrible, but then I made up my mind and I knew that after my training I will leave home forever and live my own life in the way I wanted: travelling, meeting new people, new cultures, new countries, new places, new adventures, new dangers, new risks... Just to become myself.
As children, we are forced to be in the way our family want us. We are trained based in the culture, laws and in the likes and dislikes of our parents. With all the "should" and "should not" that we are forced to follow. I never understood that way of educating and still I don't understand it. I'm a teacher and educator myself, but I never imposed anything to the children with whom I worked. Because they have to learn from their own mistakes, not from yours.
One day, after I was already out of my country for some years, a friend asked me why I had that kind of life, just travelling without a base. I said "because I like it and I feel free". She said "would not that be, that you are running away from your #family?".
At that moment I laughed and I said no. But years later I realized, that yes, I was travelling because I felt great, but also because the kind of family I grew up with, in a way, pushed me to do it. Because I wanted to be free from them and be myself. I didn't want to be a servant of my siblings any more. I wanted to get up in the mornings peacefully without anybody screaming at me. I wanted to do what I wanted, when I wanted, with whom I wanted, where I wanted. And travelling alone gave me that.
So, yes, one reason because I started travelling was to run away from home, and the further away from them, the better.
But in another hand, we are 7 siblings, and no one of them had the same wishes as me. So, why me? why I wanted that, while all my other siblings love being in their homes, with their partners or alone, watching television, playing games on the computer, and having no any second thought about life.
Then comes a second reason: it comes from my birth. I was just born to be like this till I'm grown up enough to decide what I want with my #life.
But about that, it's another subject.
