Setting forth

At a certain moment you discover that the need to leave, to get involved in new roads, is so strong and so spontaneous that it's no longer a choice, it's no longer part of the rational decision of our will but belongs to a physiological requirement of our body as much as that of eating and drinking. It becomes almost a metabolic condition, something that is rooted in ourselves and activates a new body state. The journey is a multi-sensorial need, it is a set of multiple stimulus that flood and fill us in order to erase a kind of daily indolence.

With my bike in the Appennine mountains facing Monte Rosa in the Alps range

Setting off on the road is a sublime state, because although we are always in this world, in a certain way we live as an existence a little outside of its patterns, we feel freer, we do not belong nobody, we can observe and contemplate without being asked anything, being hosted alopng the path and belonging a little bit to everything without weighing to someone in particular.

 

Peloponnese region, Greece, with my friends Martina, Matteo and Claudio

 

The world becomes our playground, we learn how it works here and there, in one country or another, in the most different situations in which we run into, trying and growing up, freely, because nobody requires us to continue, to follow that road rather than another. When we feel full we leave and continue. We bring with us a baggage of people, places, memories, possibilities, doors that may have been open but we haven't stepped in. We discover that the future is full of possibilities. The journey continually reinvents our future, it is a temporal dimension and not just a spatial one, because every day it puts us in a position in which we have to redetermine continuously what our future will be.

The unknown beyond the horizon

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are build for

 

The mind, the fantasy are the source from which spring every intention of exploration, every sense of willing to cross that horizon that sorround us, the hedge that enclose our world. The ancestors and we modern too have created the world around us first of all imagining it. It is that inner impulse that push ourselves every time a little bit beyond toward the horizon that encloses what we know and see, that encompass the experience already acquired, the world already assimilated and explored. Is this horizon that give impulse to our fantasy and imagination, that raise our spirit of research and the intuition of alternative possibilities. 

 

Towards France through Alps by bike in early spring

Learning and evolve

Living without taking the time to reflect on one's own past and on one's own actions makes us incapable of modifying one's own future, it is like being transported without knowing oneself in depth in order to truly choose and not being induced by something more external, by something that does not come from within.
 
To become aware of who we are, to really know oneself perhaps it is necessary to endeavour to do new experiences that slowly leads us to understand our nature as human beings and to put it together with our past of individuals, while our self-awareness awakens: the way we look to the world and to ourselves always changes, sometimes quickly, without being able to control or understand what is happening to us, in a continuous confrontation between what we are, what we have already incorporated and integrated and what is new and still misunderstood. Perhaps in collision with what was our equilibrium, finding ourselves unable to reconcile new and past experiences. That sense of self-conviction and self-confidence born from being able to build our security and equilibrium falters: something new has taken over, we are introduced deep into our soul and started a kind of gestation, of inner labor.
 
These things happen more or less unconsciously to everyone, every time we are faced with something unexpected, every time we feel a new sensation that was not there before. Instinctively we seek an inner peace, a serenity and we go towards what makes us good, we want to live that feeling of feeling good, of inner gaiety, of quiet security towards the future, but we tend to understand what is happening around us , the relationships between the phenomena around us, the behavior of people, the awakening of life, we remain absorbed by the beauty of things around us, opening ourselves, rejoicing and suffering at the same time, we are inebriated by discovery, by knowing and understanding also a king of new power.
 
Every learning transforms us a little, and at the beginning this transformation happens a little unconsciously, we accept it without understanding what is happening to us. Then comes a more conscious state, we perceive something autonomous that lives in us and does not depend too much on our will. So with time the awareness begins: we step off on a path through which we know we will become ready to welcome new life experiences without fear but with quiet determination, step by step, we will be able to observe and penetrate the many facets and possibilities of human nature, in its goodness and its sufferings, and pass through it without losing that feeling of self that is limpid and ardent, that sort of fresh and calm courage that keeps our vital impulse vigorous.
 
Over time perhaps we will have compassion and love for every human being we will meet because we will be free from fear.