Travel, Cities, the Shape of Boundaries

If some say that travel is about discovering a new world,

about finding a new self,

then traveling alone, for me,

is more like a quiet return,

reconnection,

to a sensation that had been interrupted,

cool, smooth,

something I touch again gently,

with the palm of my hand.

The fragment of air,

and the expressions of people passing by,

small, trivial conversations on street corners,

the smell of the sea, the distance or closeness of the sky,

the texture of the ground beneath the soles of my sneakers

Then I begin to feel all subtle differences

in the way all of it flows into my body.

The voices of children at play,

lovers, quietly content in the sun

the tones of their shining skin, the colours of their eyes,

hair swaying in the light,

the texture of time itself moving through the streets

all of it is beautiful and feels tender.

***

***

A solitary journey into a new city

often draws me inward,

as if I am slowly sinking into myself.

It reminds me of skipping school as a child

because I felt like I was sick but actually wasn't,

The world continues as it always does,

while I slip gently, unnoticed, smoothly, outside of it.

I have no impact on anything.

I pass through, lightly, like something transparent.

Within my mother tongue,

inside an invisible room with walls you cannot see,

It's like I am sitting there quietly,

thinking that I am seeing through the world

but actually am facing myself.

And there is a certain peace there.

A kind of stillness my body has been seeking all along, like clear air.

In that quiet, I observe.

The small reactions of the body,

the faint echoes, the resonances

I listen carefully, attentively.

It feels like reading a long book.

Tracing the new lines as I go,

I watch what rises and falls within me.

Touching the time of the city,

I observe its ripples

forming and disappearing quietly inside myself.

***

***

Well, when did it change?

Travel is no longer something that brings the intense excitement of festivals or celebrations.

It is no longer like a naive, foolish first love.

What I feel now each time I travel

is something quieter, something to be savoured.

A calm, enduring movement of the heart.

What, after all, was “the exotic”?

Perhaps I never truly felt it to begin with.

Did I lose the childlike innocent sensitivity that once found the world endlessly fascinating?

Or is it that I have already been shaped

by a culture at the centre of globalization

that erases differences

and flattens the world into sameness?

Where I grew up,

there always seemed to be a longing for elsewhere.

a version of “travel”

that felt more like consumption than encounter.

for America, for Paris, for something distant.

Consumption of difference.

Consumption of distance.

in some ordinary way, I must have shared that longing too.

But perhaps that was simply a desire for what was far away

a simple attraction to what was not yet known.

Like a kind of blind love

born of distance and ignorance.

So perhaps this change in me is not a loss, but something gained.

There are those who fear

that knowledge will take away wonder.

But physics, science, history, books, all forms of learning

do not make the world smaller.

They make it more complex, deeper, and quietly more beautiful.

Not through spectacle, but through sustained questions, and a gentle sense of awe.

***

***

A city feels like a vessel of time.

The people who live there are obviously no different from us.

They love good food, sun, nature,

care for family and friends,

and continue the small handwork of living.

And yet, the city itself

like language shaping the contours of thought

emerges as air,

as color,

as texture,

in the corners of streets,

quietly forming the structure of life there,

and the very texture of time that flows through it.

Cities with deep histories

leave their traces everywhere

sometimes visible,

sometimes almost erased

scattered across the surface of the streets.

For a traveler,

or maybe for an observer,

a city can be read

as layers of time and memory.

A city is a vessel of time.

And yet, those who live within it

often forget all of this

and simply live in the present.

As we all do—we are all unable to carry our past and context in full,

forgetting, and continuing to live.

***

***

There is something particular about port cities.

Istanbul.

Time layered upon time,

flowing all at once.

Busy,

hurried,

and yet somehow slow.

Things arrive and disappear,

intersect,

and move outward again.

And within all that movement,

old streets remain.

steep, winding, indirect.

Ordinary conversations at corners.

Prayers absorbed into the air.

A city that continues, holding contradictions within itself.

Stockholm.

Quiet and slow,

yet precise and attentive.

Rivers, forests, lakes

all breathing alongside daily life.

Open,

yet ordered,

with that space to remain still.

Singapore.

Artificial, intensely efficient

yet within its systems, different rhythms of time intersect so dynamically.

A precise, controlled structure,

and a street life that moves so freely beyond it.

A strange balance

where difference is not erased but reorganized.

Lisbon.

The flow of time is so gentle.

Like that Atlantic harbour

so still as if it were an endless lake

dreaming of the unknown world.

The past feels close,

as if it has settled into the city.

Memory, loss,

a longing for imagination, for adventure

and the texture of the everyday.

Venice.

The city itself is infrastructure.

Water is infrastructure.

Water is time.

It flows, and yet it remains.

A fragile beauty,

sustained against disappearance.

New York.

A vast city

where time is carved evenly

relentlessly.

Diversity appears as competition.

Growth accelerates everything.

Overwhelming stimuli,

dreams,

excessive light,

the promise of transformation,

constant renewal.

A city of endless self-reinvention.

But toward what? No one asks.

And within it, everyone is somehow alone and disconnected.

***

***

I grew up near the sea,

but not like these port cities

but in a place that felt closed.

Time moved slowly.

Values were stable, almost uniform.

The sky was so deep, vivid, almost overwhelming,

like the sunset over the small river

from the small bridge,

almost unseen, quietly unnoticed,

sometimes too much to take in,

restless, unsettling something within me.

On clear, dry days,

when the sky felt so high and blue,

snow insects would appear,

to announce the coming of winter,

and soon after, snow would begin to fall so softly,

like powdered sugar.

Clear rivers held fish,

where I once went fishing with my father and brother.

Summer carried the scent of rain

and the living earth.

On summer nights like that

bored and full of restless energy

we would go out to catch insects.

We would find fireflies, dim and drifting,

floating down the river like small lanterns.

Wild cherry blossoms, blooming so quietly, almost unnoticed.

Wild salmon swimming upstream.

And all of them, their lives were so short.

And yet, the seasons would return, unchanged.

***

***

Perhaps that is why I am drawn to what is complex,

layered, unstable, incomplete.

To places where boundaries blur,

where differences coexist,

where things continue to shift.

It does not have to be a port city

but only a place at the edge,

where worlds meet and remain unresolved.

I guess I have always felt a quiet discomfort with a world closed by a single answer.

To exist without reducing complexity.

I find that kind of world beautiful.

And perhaps that is why I am drawn to travel

to places where contradictions remain,

unresolved,

and quietly, unmistakably, alive.

My dear friends,

what is travel for you?