Transformation through Exploration

In my short life of 23 years, I have had the greatest opportunities to explore this world. I’ve traveled, alone, with friends and with family. I’ve lived across oceans, in big cities like Paris and Rome. Crowded, international, touristic, endless, full of culture. All these opportunities I’ve been given have gifted me in ways not anyone will understand.

All this moving, learning, and uncovering have built so much inside me but have also created space for curiosity, knowledge that there is more, and that in a world as endless as this miraculous one we live in, there is no space for boredom, laziness or settling for less. I’ve met people that have changed my life with a sentence. I have had to change my lifestyle, had culture shock, language, time zone, salutations, even style- to be able to move with the flow of wherever I am.

What I am trying to allow you to see with all this unintended bragging is that fortunate explorers like me have learned to feel things from many different places. Close to home, far from home, to understand people who you met 2 weeks ago but feel like family, to have a life created far away from where you are and keep in touch, to attach deeply to routines and places that you must let go of, to feel freedom and absence too deeply. Living alone you comprehend survival in a fast-paced reality, to care for yourself on your own, you learn to be scared on your own and to be lonely on your own. So many great things come with all this experience, because all these feelings and moments that can feel quite small, transform the person you are. Being around and meeting hundreds of people with lives extremely different from what is real to you teaches about tact, and caring and about showing how important people are to you no matter the differences or distances.

We develop the power of what being together and apart is, the power of reading people, the power of trusting. We by reason become experts in being honestly interested in other people’s lives because we are curious, and we care. We become love and kindness because a slap of culture thrown at you is heavy. We become sensitive to the world and kneel in vulnerability, after we realize we have seen so much, understood half of it and are small beings in this world so big.

I guess with all this moving we are gifted with the ability to build something amazing even though we know it will come to an end at a certain point. We have learned to appreciate every-single-thing, every single moment, every day, as it is only a day closer to the end of a prodigious experience that you cant feel unless you live it. It’s like your favorite meal, you take a long time to cook it, when you have it In front of you a wide smile and deep appetite is all you have, so when you eat it, you softly devour every bite because you know it will be over soon. The magic is you learn to ignore that small pain in the back of your mind that knows it will all be over, because the end doesn’t matter if you undoubtedly enjoy the whole ride.

It's all really about giving importance to the important moments, things and people. Never leaving behind curiosity and kindness.

Xoxo, Stella.