You have an image in your mind of each place you’re going to.
They’re always wrong. When I arrived at a new place I always tried to compare
how I thought it would be to how I actually experienced it. Often the image I
held had slipped away before I knew it-
‘Behind a veil of waking eyes, a trailing mist, a dream
forgot’.
Writing this in retrospect, all the images I had have been
lost, replaced by irrefutable sights, sounds and smells that mark the sphere of
concrete experience. Of what actually happened. This is no bad thing, most of
the time what I actually saw and did was vastly superior to what I imagined. But
I do miss the mystique of made-up impressions based on stories and rumour. Now
I’m looking forward to my next trip and have started building a whole new
library of images to explore in my mind until I leave. I think maybe that’s part
of the reason why people get the ‘travel bug’; because in that continual cycle
of replacing your concepts of these places with concrete experiences, you lose
something. Maybe having these images in your mind isn’t as important as going
and experiencing the real thing; after all that’s the whole point of going away.
But exploring in your head for weeks or months before you go is a beautiful, addictive
process..
This has happened to me everywhere I've gone. :)
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