Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet, Letter #4

 

So, why? In my case, the impetus was a rather typical one. One day, life is all colors and music, the other day, life is a fucking dark hole sucking in every piece and bit of you and leaving behind a solid line of red colored shit. Dreams, values, plans, formerly held together in a clear and beautifully shaped crystal ball are lying all around, shattered into pieces, indistinguishable from the thick layer of dust. Nothing to hold on to, nothing to believe in, nowhere to see nor hear. The sudden darkness of the world numbs your senses, all that is left is bottomless loneliness, confusion, anger, disappointment and blah blah blah, you get the idea.

The good thing about shit is that it starts to stabilize after a month or five. With the passing of time, the original leitmotif of running away from certain memories changed into a purely distilled desire to be alone. No, not to be alone for the sake of being alone, like diving into one’s loneliness and continue shedding tears to justify the good feeling about feeling bad and stuff. This was an inexpressible desire to by with myself. I wanted to crunch through a huge portion of a pizza solitudine con mozzarella di bufala and enjoy every single bite of it.

After few days of research and few weeks waiting for visa, I was ready. Well, I not ready in the “actually-prepared” kind of sense. I knew nothing about most of the places I was going to see, I had tickets only for few main segments of the whole track, as I was supposed to obtain the connecting tickets from random travel agencies along the way. Oh, and the thing about having to register your stay in Russia at a local office or police or wherever within 72 hours after entering the country? Well, I couldn’t squeeze time for that in my schedule and I was planning to improvise (=ignore it and pray). But I was prepared in the metaphorical “yeah-let’s-do-this” kind of sense.

You know, the “oh-shit-oh-shit-the-plane-leaves-so-there-is-no-way-of-not-going-anymore-if-I-don’t-feel-like-wasting-everything-I-did-in-the-past-few-months” kind of sense.

The plan was pretty much straightforward. Flying from Prague to Moscow. And then travel through few parts of Asia (Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan) solely by means of a train or a ship. No friends or traveling partners, that would only ruin the whole experience. I planned few stops along the way (namely Irkutsk, Ulan-Bator, Beijing, Shanghai, Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo), but didn’t plan much with the intention to slowly fill in my leather notebook I have received from my sister.

Oh yes, the leather notebook from my sister. I never though that receiving a thing would ever make my cry. Until this moment she is the only person in this world who managed to pull this off and until today I have no idea how did she manage to understand what kind of things was I after.

Other things I was taking with me were a Canon 70D and a 36 years old Zenit-E kindly borrowed from my papa. In case you wonder why take two cameras, the first is for documentation and the second is for taking pictures and occasional self-defense. No, really. I have to always keep the Zenit close-by as an occasional bump into a person could seriously hurt him or her. Mama was a proud sponsor of the red backpack (which I won’t go into describing right now as its awesomeness deserves its own post).

Best thing about this whole idea was the uncertainty.

Yeah, exactly the one thing that most people try to desperately avoid – both in work and in personal lives. I craved for new ingredients for the future, unknown, but hopefully better, and more engaging myself. I wanted to see how the brain of a future me copes with all that randomness. The thing is, we perceive our lives as stories. Our brains process almost everything into stories. We chew through various experiences and connect them all into nice arcs that help us define a certain meaning or reason to our lives. Let’s not get into details regarding the stories being flexible enough to accommodate for our own, ever-changing perceptions of ourselves and helping us improve this or that part of ourselves in the view of others based on the context, enabling us to explain our motives flexibly when we talk about them and try to “make sense” of all that shit that we have done.

Anyway, I believe this is the reason why we tend to say “everything happens for a reason”. We simply find it, create it. But until our brains gets the food to process and then crunches through it all, there is either nothing to begin with or too much to digest – pure chaos.

And this was the uncertainty I was hoping for. I had no idea how things will shape me, how will they eventually impact my further decisions, and how will I connect it all (as that is often possible only in hindsight).

At this point in my life, just moments before transforming this cute little idea into reality, I really had no idea how it all would possibly turn out.

Oh my.

I really had no idea at all.