On a solo trip some months ago, during a brief sit-down facing a layered park, with a lively city behind me, it occurred to me how travel can be multi-directional, all-revealing, whispering a secret we all somehow already know: that every space, no matter how vast or tiny, holds the same three elements. Landscape, movement, and growth.
A mountain range that stretches into the horizon, a beach that dances with the tide, a bustling city that never sleeps, a mind that never rests. All landscapes for discovery, challenge, conquering, triumph, failure, learning, understanding, pain and joy.
They all hold meaning, folded and coded in their own special worlds.
A drop in the ocean, a grain of sand, even a photon of light, landscapes harbouring entire worlds, move through space and time with a purpose we don’t fully understand. Some might say it’s all mechanical. But the drop, the grain and the photon might well see what we can’t, and know what we don’t. Perhaps we need to question and acknowledge that’s just our limited way of naming their movement .
At a human scale, we call it “up, down, left, right, north, east, west, south”. But would a miniature cosmos inside a droplet of seawater recognise these words? Perhaps it feels more like “falling inward, swelling outward, locking, unlocking, merging, diverging”. Or perhaps what it knows, the motions that shape its worlds, are not yet in our vocabulary, or indeed, knowledge.
And then there’s the brain; this very brain that is processing all of these thoughts, where every neuron pulses quietly in its own dim universe, sending a signal that travels across the landscape of the mind. It fires, and stretches, seeking something: a mission, connection, purpose, meaning, forming something new. Its world growing into a picture, a sound, a sensation, a feeling, a word. Much like the growth of connection we experience when we move in a new landscape.
When I think about it this way, I realise that every journey, whether across a continent or across a synapse, holds the same secret the world keeps trying to tell us:
that travel isn’t a destination,
it’s a way of being alive.
Where have your travels taken you recently?
