10 years working in Paris.
There’s a lot here: beauty, culture in all forms, places that are incredible, so many events, the Seine and that mix of people from everywhere, constantly overlapping.
But it’s also a city that never stops. People rush, everyone’s caught in their own rhythm. You can be surrounded and still feel completely invisible. Making connections here hasn’t come easily.
And still, I like to come and go.
We are constantly told to take care of ourselves first and only then turn to others. What troubles me is not the attention to self-care but the sequence it implies: first me, then the others. I’m not convinced that we need to suspend our relationships and collective projects until we are ‘fixed’, “repaired” or fully healed.
If I had waited for that moment, I would still be waiting.
This reflection did not begin with this trip. It comes from years of situations in which focusing on myself and prioritizing recovery would have been considered the right thing to do.
I know solitude well and I sometimes choose it. Time alone gives me the freedom to think and follow ideas at my own pace, without having to translate myself for anyone. But there are moments when staying alone stops helping.
Working with others does something solitude cannot. It forces ideas out of my head and into situations where they have to be discussed, adjusted and acted upon. This is what happened in Uganda. I worked with local partners on educational initiatives, thinking through concrete problems together, helping articulate ideas and deal with constraints that did not allow easy solutions or abstract thinking.
It can sound convincing, right? Maybe I leave with the comfortable feeling of having done something useful for a while?
But what happens when I return? Not whether I am “transformed” but what I actually continue to do once I am back.
When I return, distance reappears. Time gets partitioned again. Other obligations take the foreground. I come back tired, after weeks of overstimulation, constant movement and mental load. The people I worked with in Uganda are still there, with their realities; I am back elsewhere, with mine.
So the issue is not what I understood while I was there but what I keep doing once I’m back.
Do I stay in contact, keep working on what we started and accept the constraints of coordination across distance?
Do I keep allocating real resources to something that won’t reward me with a feeling of “progress”?
Or do I come back with vivid memories, a few strong convictions and no durable form of continuation? #slowtravel #sustainability #travelblogger
Between intentions and limits
We never know what will happen when we leave. I left open to whatever might come. And still, when situations arose, they surprised me, moved me, sometimes deeply, again and again.
At first, leaving was a way to get out of a reality that had become narrow and to relearn how to navigate places where I knew nothing, where prior knowledge could not guide me. I knew that any sense of how situations functioned would have to be built through direct contact: watching how people moved, worked, spoke and spending time with them.
I did not set out to “come back to myself” but to look outward. And yet, despite this focus on the outside, I could not set myself aside. Each evening, the same question returned: what does it mean to be here, now, while still in recovery? Am I running away? From what? Or am I reconnecting with a pull toward the outside world, curiosity and exploration after a long period turned inward? Despite constant movement, I sat with myself each night, trying to put words to what I had lived. During the day, my attention was absorbed by what was happening around me; in the evening, it came back to me.
I wanted to remain involved in what was happening without disconnecting or escaping. I kept asking myself how I could show up for others and contribute without losing touch with what these situations were doing to me.
I also wanted to take part in local projects. I met people already involved in educational and community initiatives, listened to what they were building and explored how my experience could be useful within their projects, on their terms. Once involved, expectations appeared quickly and some went beyond what I could realistically offer. My experience helped me connect with people and grasp local dynamics but finding the right role was difficult. I had to draw lines, clarify what I could commit to and accept that this would sometimes lead to disappointment, my own and theirs.#travelnotes #uganda #eastafrica #slowtravel #worldtraveller
Why do we travel? 2/2
Third, travel can loosen the central position we occupy in our own lives. When we are far from familiar roles, we are no longer the reference point of every situation. We walk into places where nobody knows who we are, where our personal histories are irrelevant, where our opinions do not structure the conversation. This decentering is a reminder that the world does not need us to make sense.
Fourth, philosophers have long linked movement to thought. Travel interrupts habits and forces attention into the present. Thinking, in this sense, unfolds while we walk, negotiate, ask, wait, watch, stay.
And then there is an impulse that is harder to name: the impulse to explore, often called Wanderlust. It is that attraction to what lies beyond what we already know. Wanderlust is not mere restlessness. It is the wish to live in a world that feels wider than our routines, our fears and the identities we already know how to inhabit.
This is why travel is not a pause in life.
The real question comes when we return: What remains of encountering other ways of living when routine comes back? What happens to friction when comfort reappears? What stays decentered when the world feels familiar again? And do we keep thinking or do we smooth everything back into silence?
That is where the journey continues.
#travelnotes #slowtravel #uganda #landscapephotography #volcano
Why do we travel? 1/2
We leave home for many reasons: for rest, for curiosity, for escape, among others. Some travel stays close to comfort and to what we already know. Other travel takes us into contexts where our usual routines don’t work and our ways of interpreting situations no longer fit. It is this second kind of travel I want to speak about.
Several philosophers suggest that, when we travel in this way, it can open at least four kinds of experience: encounter with other ways of living, friction with reality, decentering of the self and thinking in movement. None of these are automatic; you can cross the globe and avoid them entirely. But when they do occur, they shift what feels normal, what seems important and how we position ourselves in relation to others and to the world.
Encountering other ways of living means entering worlds that do not mirror our own: rhythms of life we are not used to, rules we did not help write and values or ways of living that do not easily match what we normally expect. It often appears through ordinary scenes: how time is lived, how work is shared, how relationships are organised, how communities function without reference to us.
Very often, what we see abroad is first filtered through habits of thought we bring from home. We begin to really see these ways of living when we pay attention to how life actually works for the people who live there. When that happens, this encounter unsettles what we took for granted and challenges what we assumed was obvious.
Travel also confronts us with the resistance of reality. It is rarely smooth. Plans fail, routes change, bodies get tired, weather ignores our schedules and other people’s priorities do not adjust to ours. The world does not reorganise itself around our expectations. Many trips are deliberately designed to avoid friction altogether: smooth transitions, curated experiences, controlled comfort. Friction emerges when we accept that the world will not adapt itself to us. #TravelNotes #BeyondTourism #SlowTravel #EastAfrica #uganda
