Life is elsewhere...

Zambia from west to east: I must have dreamt the last part of the trip ‘cause we were crawling over giant stones, in thick forest trails, in the middle of night and didn’t know whether we were lost.

Anxiety creeps in aboard. in those moments, the natural bravado that prevails among three Europeans gone for an African adventure always leaves way to a feeling of inadequateness.

We are inadequate, because this isn’t our jungle. Our jungles are corporate, they are urban, they are sport contests, the are school and university exams, they are controlled and they have parameters and boundaries. We have been programmed since our early childhood to survive these kinds of trials.

We saw “Into the Wild” yesterday. There is an emotional climax in the movie, which is when all Chris McCandless’ youthfulness, optimism and playfulness utterly and completely vanishes when he realises that this is no longer a game: he is trapped into the wild and he is going to die.

At that moment, one cannot help thinking how shallow and inadequate his idealistic visions of freedom – of leaving society for the uncorrupted world of nature - now sound, however empathetic one feels towards them.

Dreamers cannot bear much reality. They want adventures, but not too much. They want revolutions, but someone else has to carry them out for them, etc. That’s what Kundera called the “bloody smile of innocence” ( “Life is elsewhere”).