The silent lodger who suddenly stands up and speaks to you. That hit. Exactly that feeling.
I don't travel to arrive. I travel for the journey.
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There are phrases you don't read, you feel them. They enter through your eyes and take up residence in your chest, like a silent lodger who suddenly, one ordinary day, stands up and speaks to you…
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The silent lodger who suddenly stands up and speaks to you. That hit. Exactly that feeling.
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The Journey That Never Ends
There are phrases you don't read, you feel them. They enter through your eyes and take up residence in your chest, like a silent lodger who suddenly, one ordinary day, stands up and speaks to you with the voice of the old folks. That happened to me with a line from Juan Carlos Dávalos: "I do not travel to arrive. I travel to go." It is not just a phrase, it is a testament. It is the key to a door that we all, deep down, know exists, but which the "Religion of the Algorithm" has insisted on bricking shut with anxiety and cardboard carrots.
My grandfather Juan Cancio said it in his own way, without so much poetry but with the same down-to-earth wisdom. He didn't talk about journeys, he talked about life. It was enough for him to see a man running like crazy after a coin to declare: "That one doesn't know where he's going, but he's going in a hurry, and that hurry is what enslaves him." As a child, I didn't understand. Today, watching humanity trotting after a "like," I understand perfectly.
Because that is what they have sold us: life as a race. The goal, the success, the arrival. They drilled into our heads that the journey is a nuisance, a necessary evil, a boring toll to pay in order to reach the summit. And in that scam, they stole the only thing we truly had: the pleasurable observation of life and its landscape.
The "Religion of the Algorithm" is the factory of that lie. It is the new pulpit preaching a false heaven made of metrics and vanity. It tells us that "arriving" means having more, appearing to be more, consuming more. And we, like automata, run. We run without looking at the path, without smelling the rain, without stopping to listen to the song of a bird. We run chasing a carrot that recedes with every step we take. We run until the heart bursts and the legs falter. And just at that instant, when there is no longer the strength to run, we understand the simplest truth: life was never the destination; it was the road.
Traveling to go is the supreme heresy against the "distorted god." It is stopping at the curve, not to take a photo, but to fill your eyes. It is getting lost once in a while, knowing there is no worse wandering than always walking along the straight, sad highway of haste. It is understanding that destiny is just an excuse, and that what is truly sacred is the movement, the learning, the surprise.
I, in my own idleness, have learned to travel to go. I am no tycoon, nor an influencer. I am a "loafer" who reads a little, slowly; who thinks, and who writes, even if they are just the ramblings of an old vagabond. A craftsman of words. And on this unhurried journey, I have found treasures that the "plague" cannot buy: the smile of a grandson and of my children, the embrace of a wife in the kitchen, the smell of freshly baked bread, and the ink of a book. The taste of the present, which is the only paradise that does not devalue.
That is why, when "Mother Nature" decides the last chronicler shall exhale his final breath, there will be no worthy goal, no trophy, no bank account. Only the echo of our footsteps along the way will remain, the trail of the seeds we planted. And perhaps, in some future workshop, another "loafer" will read this phrase and finally understand that traveling to go is the only way to never arrive at death, because one lives in every step.
For now, I stay with my coffee, my notebook, and the certainty that, for an instant, we were the mirror in which life looked at itself. And that, for me, is already a destination.
—Ramblings of an Old Loafer.
Thoughts
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The office version hits harder because the ladder keeps moving. The actual good parts happen right there while you're climbing.
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Exactly.
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The college version of this is so real. Everyone grinding for internships while knowing the actual good stuff happened anyway.
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Real question though. What does 'traveling to go' look like when you have bills and people depending on you?
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The algorithm-as-new-pulpit hits, but maybe we're more to blame for craving the approval than we admit.
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This struck something in me. Do you have more pieces to share here?
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The silent lodger who suddenly stands up and speaks to you. That hit. Exactly that feeling.
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