Happiness or freedom?
By: Georgiana Bularca
Tags: Travel, Digital Nomads, Thoughts And Feelings, Freedom, Alternative Lifestyle

Most people live anchored in their communities, close to their family and friends, in towns and houses they can call home. They’re privileged by continuity and things never ending. They walk through familiar streets and known faces and rest in the same bed every night. They drop in unexpected, put smiles on their parents’ faces, drive you home in the middle of the night, meet you for 10 minutes outside work, make every party about you and worry about your next day hangover. They console you, they laugh with you and they are always a few minutes away. You feel safe and protected. You exist. The world around you is a display of what you add to it. The smell of coffee, warm apple pie, scented candles, mulled wine, fresh cut oranges, laundry hanging in the sun. The sound of chatter and drunk steps on empty streets, Ella Fitzgerald on Sunday mornings, raised voices over toilet seats and the rustle of sheets while love making. You belong because you add and subtract to the micro-universe enough times to count. There’s so much harmony in having second chances for every moment, and to commit to finetuning every detail until your reality mirrors every aspect of your beauty. The world is at your service.

Or is it worth it to jump into a lyrical loop, instead? To change prompts more often than shirts; to leave everything and everyone behind, missing bits and pieces scattered all over the world? What do you learn from dedicating time to doing so many things only once and be left with them ghosting every inch of your body for what I assume the rest of your life? How does it feel to not be needed? To just be wanted for a short time? To be expected to give your very best because the seconds are counted and you don’t get to repeat the same mistakes again? How much work is there in getting it perfect the first time? And how cold the detachment if you don’t? How do you perceive places and people when, by the time you arrived, you had already left in your mind? How many times did you drag your tipsy heart to some anonymous hotel room? How often did your mind contradict you, asked you why and told you to slow down, to stop even? Were you ever so lonely, lonelier than yesterday and even more than the day before? Hundreds of people around going home and you going nowhere, everywhere?

Living inside your memories that become so as soon as you acknowledge time. So many, so often, and they keep adding. You find yourself struggling to remember names, things they said, the softness of their skin, still seeing those eyes, still dreaming of that smile, still thinking about that street where you had your last or first kiss stolen. You are dying to remember the taste of the cinnamon buns at that small bakery on the corner, bitter coffee early in the morning with the sea knocking at your door, cutting squares from a juicy mango, with the smell of incense lingering from the next door temple. Views from skyscrapers and mountains, chatter in all different languages, nightmares with deserts, on highways, planes crashing. By the time you hear that song again the continent will have changed and all stakes are back on.

Everybody moves on. You only move forward. The world swallowed you in exchange for a timeless reply to your “why”. You wanted to know all its secrets and so you became one. No one knows who you really are or where you are going. Your existence doesn’t belong to you or anyone, anymore. You can no longer be whole, you can only be substance. Nothing feels like it used to. The more reality throws itself at you, the more you live inside the projections of everything you touch. Your pulse is filled with flowers from dozens of fields. Your heart added hundreds of tears to monsoons and thunderstorms. Your eyes are bright with the stars of a thousand night skies. Your body shakes with laughter in a thousand middle of nowheres. Your ears heard countless hopes and dreams. You become smell, taste, ocean, love; you become all the strange things. All the strangers. Otherwise air, wind, horizon, departed. You become the ever changing world. You become the answer.

This is how freedom feels. Can happiness beat it? You can only pick one.