Thursday, December 18, 2008

From the beginning...

WHY?
This blog is started for the main purpose of sharing my travel experiences. All these while, I have been penning down my travel experiences in a small black journal that I've been carrying around with me on my trips. Afterwhich, I often find myself having to replicate some of my thoughts and travel tips in various online travel forums or emails (whenever friends/relatives ask for travel advice)...and I find that it's just too time-consuming to type (& retype) the stuffs that I had handwritten in my journal.

So I figured it'll be much easier if I were to put everything in a blog and whenever people ask....I need only to tell them to refer to my blog. Of course, having a blog will also allow me to post alongside my stories, vivid photos which probably can tell a thousand more words than what I'm capable of writing.

And although this blog is meant for my travel escapades...I obviously do not travel enough to fill pages after pages of it...hence, it's very likely that I'll also use this platform to express my often absurd and random thoughts every now and then.

WHAT IS LOSTLESSNESS?
So why the strange blog title you may ask? Actually, I'm not even sure if "lostlessness" is a proper English word (well at least I couldn't find it in the dictionary). But just imagine for a second that there's such a word and my personal definition for it would be - "lost-lessness - the feeling of not being lost". And this, I think, is the true essence of travel.

In my earlier travel days, I used to get very flustered whenever I couldn't find my way to where I had planned to go. And if I'm allowed to dwell on it, eventually fear and self-loathe would creep in and I would end up being so miserable that I'd be totally shut off from even the most beautiful sights along the path wrongly taken.

As I grew older (and wiser, I hope) and having taken endless "wrong paths" (all thanks to my sucky map reading skills!), I have realised that "being lost" is perhaps just a state of mind. We are/feel lost only if we allow ourselves to and there's really no fun in being lost. So why not just take the deviation from the original planned route as an opportunity to uncover something new...something exciting perhaps?

It's weird as I think back on all my previous trips, that many of my best and most memorable travel experiences had been the result of such "deviations" from the paths much travelled. I can only attribute it to the thrill and excitement of discovering the unknown. And it would've been most unfortunate to miss out on all these fun if I had allowed myself to feel lost and miserable...wouldn't it?

I suppose this sense of lostlessness should also extend to life in general. No matter how much we've planned for our lives ahead, sometimes life will still throw us a curved ball. Do we get totally disoriented, defeated and lost or do we accept it as a challenge and opportunity to grow and experience something new and to make the best of whatever situations that present themselves?

With my first post, I sincerely wish that everyone out there who's reading my blog will achieve lostlessness.

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