-This article is reproduced from the public account: Amber Classic Reading-
Bi Shumin｜Travel makes us humble
1. Travel Humbles Us
Due to work, I often travel. It goes without saying that traveling is harder than staying at home. There is an old saying in China – it is good to be at home for a thousand days, but it is difficult to go out for a while. It is said that it is not easy. But after a long time, staying at home, the muscles and bones are rusted, and there will be a faint anxiety, and I can’t wait to go outside for a walk.
What tempts us to give up peace and comfort, leave our warm home, and resolutely go to a distant country in a certain morning or late at night?
Of course, in many cases, it is for making a living, for responsibilities and reasons that cannot be shirked. However, with the resolution of food and clothing, more and more of us voluntarily choose-people are on the road.
Once, I was invited to visit abroad. After the prescribed activities, the host was kind enough to let me choose a completely free project so that I could get to know the country more deeply. I thought about it, and wrote it down: take a train or a long-distance bus to travel on the land. The host looked at the paper and said, well, we will be happy to accommodate your request. Just, where is your destination? Where exactly are you going?
I said, no destination, nowhere to go. Walking on the land in a car is the purpose and everything.
I stubbornly believe that to truly know a country, a nation, a piece of land, or a landscape, you must travel alone.
Travel humbles us. Speeding speed, changing scenery, strange encounters, random guests… All these possible events during the journey are strongly beyond our known scope, urging us to be vigilant with a strange and challenging attitude. Make us curious. In our frivolous and worn-out lives, fly the green flag. Inject fresh vitality into our rigid and tired life.
A long period of dwelling in a small dwelling can easily lead to narrow vision, slanted chest, weakened muscle strength, and flattened lungs… At this time, pack your bags, say goodbye to your loved ones, and embark on a journey.
Cherish the journey. Those sleepless nights on the train, standing by the window, looking at the street lamps beside the railroad tracks, flashing purple-blue light, passed away suddenly, and many memories revived like ghosts.
People often think of the long-lost past when they are traveling, and recall the voices and smiles of many old people. It seems that travel is a kind of solvent, melting the dusty cover, and the warmth like smoke rises out.
People often confide their hearts to their traveling companions who have only known each other for a few hours during the journey, and they have entered each other’s spiritual structure so deeply. I even know several young people who have found their life partner in this way.
Some people interpret these as – the journey brings people closer because there is no stake. I disagree with this point of view. It is precisely because we ride the same train and cross the same boat that we are so close. Travel diffuses the warm elements in human nature.
The journey also has difficulties and wind and rain, difficulties and dangers. However, that won’t deter true travelers. Travel is full of unknown charm, which arouses people’s tireless yearning.
2. Travel with your soul
Human knowledge is always incomplete.
He cannot know whether a region or an era is the whole of space and time. In this sense, each of us is a frog in a well, the only difference is the diameter of the well we inhabit. Everyone is also a poor summer insect, indescribable.
Therefore, we have an innate need to travel. It is our fate to be born as a summer bug, but not our fault. In the short life of summer insects, we can make a negotiation with fate. Dig the well as large as possible, and stretch the time and geographical scale. Even if it is finally impossible to see the ice, Xia Chong still faces the flawless water and the gradually biting autumn wind as much as he can, imagine the transparency of the ice and the heart-wrenching cold.
Traveling is first of all a physical marathon, and you need to make a lot of preparations in advance. Let’s talk about the body first. According to my partial experience, there are three main objects for travel.
The first, of course, is time. People often think that the most important prerequisite for travel is money, so they regard saving money as a prerequisite for travel. In fact, you can travel without money or with a small amount of money. On this point, as long as you collect patiently, you will find a lot of money-saving tips. If a person is compared to a car, the gasoline that drives us is not money, but time. The reason is extremely simple. When your time is exhausted, you can’t do anything. What else is there to talk about? In other words, travel at that time had only one direction, which was the center of the earth.
The second thing is to let go of sorrow. Sorrow is the deadly killer of travel, and one can travel without hesitation. Sorrow has weight, and one or two sorrows can turn into thousands of weights, tripping you up and down with a bruised nose and a bruised face. The most common worry comes from this kind of thinking: How much rice and baskets of vegetables can be bought with the money saved for this travel, and how long can I live in a homely life with enough food and clothing. Taking the time to satisfy your appetite as a unit of measurement is a habit that used to be useful but does not have to stick to it now.
When many Chinese people come across something novel and costly, they immediately convert it into rice and flour expenses, and use grain to make weights and measures that are ever-changing. It is a virtue to accumulate grain to prevent hunger, but everything is considered at the height of endangering life and safety, and living becomes a burden.
If anyone insists on going on a trip alone, he will curse you that your basic survival will be discounted in the future, and you will live on the streets without food and clothing… Don’t blame me for speaking in a panic, if you plan to take a more expensive trip, you will definitely hear it This kind of earnest admonition. The calculation formula for quickly converting everything into rice comes from the mental trauma left over from the farming era when food and clothing were not satisfied.
If you must save all your money to prevent problems before they happen, this is your freedom and no one else can interfere. But you have to understand that after the body’s physiological functions are satisfied, there is no need to be entangled in the viscera blindly. Always let your body talk to yourself about those things that are hungry and full, you will kill the possibility of seeing the world by yourself, and you can only spend your life within the radius drawn by your stomach. This kind of life, in the past when food and clothing had not been solved, was a last resort, and it might even become the trump card for surviving first. Today, sometimes the passage of time feels too pedantic.
The third thing is to live in the here and now of the body. how do I say this? Now that you are in good health, you can set off and walk, without having to think about the hematemesis of heart failure and the severe pain of cancer in the future. I am thinking that I still have the ability to earn some expenses for medical treatment in the future. I believe that the country’s social security mechanism will get better and better. I squeezed my arms and legs, and felt that they could still withstand the beating, so climbing up and down, eating wind and sleeping dew is no problem at present. If I really get a serious illness that can’t be cured for tens of thousands of yuan, I will die calmly. Before I die, I think about when I was healthy, hearing, and seeing. I also traveled as I wanted. The emotion when I was dying may be pride .
I am an aging car with little fuel left. I have to plan carefully and drive it carefully. Life is a meager petal of water lily in the universe, and one day it will die down and close. Before that, I must seize the time to see the disordered land of the four wilds, and to meet the great achievements and ruins left by the heroes for a while.
Finally decided to take a step forward. Many people have a habit of taking out a pen and paper and listing all the things they want to bring before going out. In travel secrets, there are many people who teach this kind of list. If you go to the cold zone, you need to bring leather gloves and snow boots; if you go to the tropics, you need to bring sunscreen, sunglasses, and mosquito repellent oil. Even if it is a blessed place that is neither cold nor hot, you have to bring a flashlight, berberine, and the phone number of the embassy or consulate…
All of these are very necessary. But there is one thing, no matter where you go, you can’t leave it for a moment. That is – do you remember to bring your own soul?
It is said that the ancient Indians had a habit, when their bodies moved too fast, they would stop, set up camp, and wait patiently for their spirits to catch up. Some people say it stops every three days, and some say it stops every seven days. In short, people can’t go on blindly, they have to stay in the gap of the journey and meet with the soul. The soul seems to be a weak person who is burdened or handicapped, slow, and often lags behind. If you go fast, it won’t be able to keep up. I think the most meaningful part of this statement is to prove that when traveling, our body and soul are out of sync and separated. And an excellent trip is naturally a highly coordinated body and soul, and life and death depend on each other.
Good travel should be as natural as breathing. The essence of travel is learning, and learning is human instinct. As a doctor, I know that one must continue to learn throughout one’s life. I am no longer a doctor, but this habit is like having smallpox, leaving mottled marks in my heart. Traveling let me know those people who lived before me, what they thought and did. Traveling also taught me, in those days when I was not born, the grand grace and harsh punishment of nature. During the trip, I learned that people should not be proud, how lonely the world is, how tall the mountains are, and how vast the ocean is. During the trip, I also learned that there is no need to be sad about death, because you have not disappeared, but just repeated in another way.
All of these problems cannot be solved by simply moving the body, and can only be left to the traveling soul to do the homework. When you set off, remind you softly that you must remember to put your soul in the rucksack. It’s so light that it doesn’t weigh a single inch, and it doesn’t take up an inch of space, but it’s far more important than GPS. It is your bread when you are hungry, and helps you pass through dangers in times of crisis.
When you sing and laugh, it also silently plays a happy face. When you beat your chest and stamp your feet, it also sheds tears and anger… Even if the soul cannot illuminate our journey like a candle, at least it must follow behind us through thick and thin, and never leave it. Otherwise, we are just a floating body staggering, knocking, giving out a hollow echo, like the withered Populus euphratica thousands of years ago.
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