To Barcelona and Beyond…
In the last three and a half months of 2024, I studied abroad in Barcelona. I feel hesitant to say, “in Barcelona,” because even though Barcelona was my host city, my home for that time felt much greater than that. It was found in the Pyrenees when I felt for the first time, figuratively and literally, that I could take a deep breath outside of the chaos. It was found solo traveling in Ireland when I had a fundamental shift in identity and knew life would never be the same. It was setting all of these expectations of what abroad was supposed to be like in order to have all of those shattered and realize I’d have to pivot in order to make the most out of this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
More so than a long trip, studying abroad felt like a novel that you read, completely immersed. But then, as soon as you’re done, you feel overwhelmed by all of the spectacular information you learned, so much so that you just put the book away and forget the actual lessons you learned. You just remember the book as “life-changing.” Coming back now to revisit my time abroad, I feel overwhelmed from starting at the beginning. Like a massive suitcase you’re looking at to unpack, you would start by unloading the last thing you had put in your suitcase, as it’s right on the top. So, for this video, I want to start at the end of my journey.
Time is never what it seems to be.
I was hyper aware of time passing in the last month I was in Europe. From a physical sense, it was hard to fathom how the hot and humid summer was now a cold winter showered by rain and snow. How do we not even notice it’s changing until it has changed? The passing of time isn’t really something you witness, though we think it is, and when we don’t realize this deception, I think it can lead us to feel unfulfilled. Let me explain.
The best time to do something is now. Ok, well, duh. But what does that really mean? I think that we put off doing things because we see them as objects of the future. We think we witness time passing because we look to the future as a guide for our use of time. Our future use of time. But as long as those ideas stay in the future and we never let them come to fruition in the present, then they really are just ideas as to how we can be living life. We gaze into the future, and it looks to be a timeline. We are deceived in that we assume our projected timeline will manifest with the passing of time. But time isn’t linear, and the only grasp we really have on it is remaining in the present.
There was a lot I did abroad and I think it all panned out wonderfully, but that last month I couldn’t shake the feeling that so many of my ideas of what I expected to accomplish traveling stayed in the future. Those ideas remained as future expectations, and that’s all they ever came to be.
When I had this realization that we don’t witness time passing, it felt a bit at first like an internal crisis. However, since then, I’ve found peace in another reality that complements this one.
Even though we can’t witness time passing, we can always experience it. And honestly, I think being immersed in the present sounds a whole lot better than watching life pass by.
But I also think we as humans, at least in my own experiences, can sometimes lean too far into the nostalgia to try to make sense of time. I have spent so much of my life trying to crack the code of time or at least make some kind of sense of it, but honestly, I never will. We never really will. Because that’s the way our brains work. Instead of fighting to try to perceive the passing of time, I have been learning to just embrace experiencing it all, knowing that it will form its natural timeline in hindsight. Instead, I’ve been working to move my future ideas to present experiences to eventually rest as fulfilling memories.
I’m attempting to make a greater theme stand out in this video. That theme being: No matter where you are in life, traveling or not, if you have the time, don’t wait to use it later. Go fulfill that time somehow. I think most of us have a list, maybe even unconsciously, of a bunch of things we would like to do in our free time. So maybe fulfill your next pocket of time by writing those down. From there, you don’t even need to think twice, and you can start experiencing things that make you happy more. Train yourself to bring your ideas to fruition. Make it a habit, even.
Here’s to experiences that make it out of the future and into the present.
