Disclaimer: This ain’t a common travel blog. If you’re expecting pictures from Machu Picchu or comparable, google it or check your socials.

Lite trigger warning: I’m discussing my honest opinions here and I’m doing that unfiltered. Be aware that some explicit language or curses could occur. The internet is full of truth-claiming content and euphemisms whereas I just want to provide my way of thinking to provoke discussions. It’s not my intention to trigger someone. Lastly, I’m always down for improvement proposals especially regarding my English skills.

This blog tends to be a companion of my personal journey independently from the travels on the one hand and a place for controversial discussions of the topics I’m facing thereby on the other. I adore philosophizing about crucial parameters and means which directly influence our daily living as well as our striving to happiness and satisfaction. What I’m about to debate in this blog are topics like social life, movement, nutrition, sleep, mindfulness and our dealing with media as well as consumerism in general. In our increasingly technologized world, I feel a growing urge to act more consciously – to question the patterns of consumption and behavior that modern society has normalized. I believe there is a rising need to reconnect with slower, more traditional ways of communication, interacting, and relating to each other and to the living world around us. The further technology advances, the more we’re prone to forget about values like presence, awareness, and real connection. That draws us away from what really matters and could cause feelings of solitude, dissatisfaction or meaninglessness concluding in a continuously search for the purpose in our life. I keep on witnessing those symptoms so frequently in people from western world. Unfortunately capitalism teaches us to seek fulfillment in the accumulation of transient external possessions. Yet, it is definitely impossible to replace what we lack inside with something from the outside. As a result, this spark, everyone’s carrying inside, is overlapped and covered with layers of external noise, societal expectations, fear, limiting beliefs, protective patterns, and the constant search for validation, making it difficult to recognize our true self. The uncovering process is ancient, still valid and so are the approaches to proceed – it’s mainly about being patient, keep away from distraction and listen to yourself. Mindfulness quiets the noise, allowing your inner voice to emerge. One key difference from the past is that the world around us is becoming increasingly noisy, making it harder than ever to hear our inner voice. It seems paradox that isolation and solitude are on the rise while we tend to struggle to endure healthy loneliness and grow from it.

I’m keen to write about my personal experiences and approaches as mindfulness took a big part in my daily life through new developed routines and habits. The journey I’m currently on is meant to be a challenge to uncover the effects of what happens when I intentionally step away from everything familiar – away from my routines, comfort zones, and the identities I’ve built around them. I want to immerse myself in unfamiliar cultures and environments to understand myself better and identify how I respond to uncertainty, discomfort, and change. At the same time, I’m curious about the people I met along the way. How do they relate to themselves? How present are they in their daily lives? How do culture, technology, and environment shape their awareness, habits, and way of living? My intention in sharing my thought along my way is to encourage further discussions, inspire reflection, and hopefully invite you to carry some of these ideas into your own everyday life and think about them further.

What about the maze?

I chose the metaphor of a maze to describe the search for consciousness towards our core values and convincements because it represents the process of finding one’s own path through a world full of distractions, influences, and uncertainties. The walls hereby symbolize layers that cover our identity built from society, culture and our past, especially from childhood influences. As distraction in our life increases enormously and we’re facing a wide range of easily accessible options, the walls become ever higher concluding an escalated difficulty finding the center of the maze. Traditional and ancient philosophic movements like yoga are aware of this coherence and offer approaches to improve navigation through the maze whereas I’m still searching for comparable strategies provided by cultures in Western society. But nothing to wonder about here – from my point of view an increased accessibility of approaches that bring you closer to yourself correlate with a reduction in consumerism and that’s blatantly not in the interest of capitalism.

I admit that the labyrinth is a fairly common symbol in philosophical writings, and has been for a long time – so it wasn’t really my creative streak that led me to it. Additionally, it played a role in the tv series “Westworld” – the humanoids, created to serve human pleasures, were programmed with a side quest through which they could find real consciousness to lastly free themselves of the “slavery” – pretty cool. Imagine yourself a corn maze: you can get lost, follow wrong directions, reach dead ends, and have to rethink your choices. These moments are part of the process, because finding the way is also about understanding yourself and recognizing the patterns that keep you from moving forward. The heart of the maze represents the inner self – a place of clarity, awareness, and perspective. Like the viewpoint often found at the center of such corn mazes, reaching this point allows you to see the bigger picture: the paths you have taken, the obstacles you encountered, and the connections between different experiences. At the same time, the center is not a final answer, it can contain different layers of understanding and new perspectives. It’s indeed a tough journey and could turn out as a lifelong which demands probably everything from us. But one thing is certain: nothing else gives us so much in return.