Sipping on my 'Flat White on the Rocks' in Skog Urban Hub café
in the heart of Brno while escaping the summer heat. Summer in Europe is erratic – one day you’ll be wrapped in your newly bought leather jacket
from Primark, feeling bad about child labour; but the next doubting your buy
while the sun threatens to turn you three shades darker. The beauty of seasons,
they call it.
It’s my 45th day in Europe and in an hour, I’ll
be leaving for Krakow, Poland, one of my most awaited destinations. I can safely
say that I am still not homesick yet but I wished I could bag my parents
along to enjoy the rawness of Eastern Europe. The stigma of girls travelling
Eastern Europe alone is still very strong, even within the region itself. Or is it
for the fact that I am too blinded by optimism and plagued by fatigue that I do
not anticipate any impeding dangers? Well, obviously that is not to say I roam
around the streets in the wee hours and walking up to drunkards, trying to
befriend them at their most irritable state.
As pretentious as I may sound, I am so inspired to start
writing again, as soon as I walked into this café. It exudes the calming aura needed for mental stimulation and draws your inner emotions, if you have any to begin with.
I don’t believe in ‘travelling to settle and finding yourself’
anymore. The oxymoron is senseless and after 6 years, I am going to admit this:
you need familiarity, you need shelter, and you need routine to figure yourself
out. Don’t get me wrong and write me an anti-thesis paper. Read on. I do not at any time
mean that you lead a mundane life without challenges but I’ve realised I can’t
be fleeting; I can’t be finding myself at a place I don’t even belong. I can't be exchanging baggages - leaving some and picking up new ones - and want the new ones to fit. You
can’t switch off and expect to be enlightened one day. You can’t disconnect and
expect to be ‘found’. You need to find your core. You need to be self-aware.
And that’s the challenge. It took me 6 years.
As Breathe Carolina would sing, “if you came looking for
gold, you won’t like what you see”, is a quote that I live by now; and it’s one
of the mentalities I hold on to so tightly, enjoying every moment I have here.
It’s almost subconscious but we humans tend to actively seek enjoyment though it
seems that if we are to enjoy anything then we must not have to think about it.
The reason why I am consciously enjoying myself is because I’ve stopped
justifying my actions or the level of happiness it’ll bring.
"Live it up in Brno"
