The only constant is change

It has been a few nights since I am in Medellín, Colombia. Life goes at a different pace when traveling. There is an overload of input for all the senses. Different sounds, smells, many new images passing in front of the eyes.

In the Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery writes:

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.

That quote, has a special place in a notebook where I was too scared of writing. It is a small Moleskine with drawings of The Little Prince on the cover. Since it was expensive, I felt like everything entering those pages needed to be extremely special. The end result was that I barely wrote in it, questioning every intention of filling the blank lines.

Muriel’s words have come to my mind often. I’m sure you know what I mean. Those moments in life when hours feel like seconds. Or the other way around.

That’s how it feels being here. I feel like I have entered another dimension where timelines and seasons get completely mixed up in my mind. Life used to be defined in seasons. Everything was more structured.

When I started traveling, that concept completely broke that mental time struct. I could be in “winter” at a beach. After work, surfing. Waking up at 4m, a time that I would have never thought would be part of my routine. Taking buses, trains, planes any day of the week. Focusing on how to get to places, learning the rhythms of the people living there, getting a SIM card in order to have internet, finding an ATM that doesn’t have a high commission, checking out how to move around. That’s the awesome thing about staying in one place longer, you don’t need to do an onboarding every time.

At times, I didn’t necessarily work from Monday to Friday and then came the weekend. Freelancing projects came and go taking away that forced structure that sometimes comes with them.

It’s interesting when you see life like a fluid thing. Like a river where a drop of water never passes by twice in the same shape at the same location. Water is always moving in one way or another. There’s a quote I love:

The only thing that never changes is that everything changes.

Traveling shakes my foundations. The smallest things are interesting. How people say thank you. Body language. Traffic. Animals. Supermarkets. Gyms. Fruits.

What situations make your life go at another rhythm? What shakes your foundations?

Have a good week.

I love you very much world,

Julia