Silence.
Yet, if you focus your consciousness, you can hear the sound of a strong wind.
The pleasant duet of coolness and warmth felt while inhaling crisp, cool air and curling up like a fetus.
The coldness of the blue water surrounding the area, with clouds covering it like a goose down blanket at an appropriate distance.
The anticipation constantly conveyed through a round, small window.
A small but unmistakable sound, “Ding,” accompanies a light turning on, and soon, a friendly voice is heard from the speaker.
A strange land approaching from afar.
The coastline, the small hills surrounding it like a band, the rice paddies and fields stacked in rectangular shapes like mud bricks, the roofs that appear sporadically and then begin to gather like a crowd, the long gray blood vessels connecting them, and the unknown people within them.
When those things approach rapidly and begin to meet the eye level, an overwhelming anticipation surges.
What will the air be like, the temperature, the sunlight, the food, the buildings, the people, and what kind of things will happen?
Anticipation for the transition of everything.
Driven by that anticipation, people unload their luggage, go through immigration, find their luggage, and finally set foot on the new land.
The satisfaction felt as one’s consciousness is gradually taken away by all the new things, the pleasure brought by oblivion.
But as someone said, familiarity is the most cunning ability of human nature.
New feelings slip away like sand through fingers with time.
Before long, the same pleasures, the same pains, the same temptations, the same lies are revealed.
Like the sun that is everywhere even if you try to avoid it, the existential question that is always and everywhere present.
Nowhere to escape, where am I? Who am I?
So, for many, travel is about returning home before the problems are revealed.
And then leaving again in search of another newness and the oblivion it will offer.
A deliberate turning away, a deliberate forgetting repeated many times.
What the New World discovered by Columbus proved, what the new world that science will discover will prove.
Salvation is not in travel, in new lands, in new women, in new men, in new things, in the New World.
Paradoxically, if I change, if I am reborn, if my conscience becomes bright, if I become an existentially different being, the entire earth becomes a new place and the entire life becomes a journey.
The true Brave New World has always been by our side, within reach if we just extend our arms.
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