Beyond the act of moving in search of knowledge, satisfaction and beauty, what is travel. What is travelling? My intention here is to digress from a very personal point of view, which starts from my road and its meaning in my life.
Since I was little I always liked small adventures, climbing on the roof of the house, the neighbours' houses, trees... To see what was behind the last stone on the beach, to swim to that island near the coast, to climb the river a little further and discover where its curves led. They always end up in the sea, but here what matters is their path.
Of all my journeys, whether short or a little longer, I always took the impression that they were short summaries of my life. Deep down on the road you are always your limit and you achieve what you were capable of achieving. Capable both because of the resources you had and because of self-imposed limitations or even misfortunes experienced or limitations along the way. Various factors with you and your experiences in between. Ultimately, you left your original point, went to a certain destination, accompanied or not by those you wanted, had the experiences unfold as possible, lived and returned.
What better example of life as a whole than a simple trip to the beach. Or even to a bar with your friends. Of the distance between the possible and the realised. Whenever I stopped doing or seeing myself being something on occasions in life, I found myself on a trip, tired, or unwell, or just not wanting something. And that's ok. I see journeys, achievements and losses as more or less little thermometers on which one can calibrate devices and reassess routes.
At another extreme of this ruler, I launch Makaxera, after having discovered that I no longer know very well how to distinguish the limits between life and the journeys I make in it. Or if life would really be a great journey, after which I will return home?
I left my parents' house ten years ago. And since then I have lived in dozens of houses, under different formats, in many states of Brazil and in some different countries. I was given the opportunity, which I embraced with force, to explore some points of the world and keep seeing where the curves led. Over the years, I have travelled to Caxias do Sul, Frankfurt, Rio de Janeiro, London, São Paulo, Manaus, Luanda, Bonn, Potsdam, Berlin and today, as I write this, I am in Italy, in a small town called Tuoro. With the exception of the last one, all the previous ones were places where I more or less believed for a certain time I would be able to develop my life there. That I would stay.
I opened companies, fell in love, made websites, had some jobs that allowed me different experiences, was married, found myself, gave myself up and ran away several times, in search of I don't know what. In search of recognition perhaps, of something that would give me meaning in life, that would give me the seal of approval to be useful to the world in its agonizing days. Of always carrying and being something, I sought an answer in many corners. But it was in Berlin that I noticed that the journey and my life were no longer distant, that the world we live in already allows both to go together and that we can live on the road and follow the heart to explore it and thus explore ourselves.
Today around here life and the road are synonymous and I really want to share this.