Sunday 21 August 2016

A powerful mug

This morning I made coffee, just like any other morning. And just like any other morning, I had to make the tough decision of which mug to drink from. I have quite an extensive mug collections, most of them from my travels. I reached for a fairly new mug I got in New York City just a few months ago. I got it at the Museum of the City of New York, and it looks like this.



It immediately reminded me of where I bought it. By that, I don't mean NYC, but the exact spot in the museum gift shop where I stood, holding it in hand, deciding if I should buy it. It reminded me of the way I felt that day, what I had seen before, what I did afterwards. And it made me want to write about it. Write about that day, about my time in NYC, about my travels in general. I haven't been writing here for a long time and I am unsure why that happened. But this little moment this morning reminded me why I wanted to write about travelling in the first place: because I like to revisit what I've experienced. We move so quickly these days that it's sometimes difficult to fully be in just one place. Travelling usually allows us to focus on the new adventures ahead and not worry about the six different things we should be doing at the same time. But as soon as we get back home, back into the routines and deadlines, we sometimes almost forget what we've seen, visited, tried just a few weeks ago. We take pictures to remind us - but we hardly ever look at them because they are all on our phone or computer. People ask us 'How was your trip to NYC?' and we say 'Amazing, I loved it.' and often that's that. I write so that it doesn't end there. That is my motivation.

To say I don't know why I stopped writing is not completely true. There have been a lot of moments these past months where I thought about it. But to be perfectly honest, it didn't seem right, posting about my holidays with everything that's going on in the world at the moment. Not a week goes by without horrible news. People fleeing, getting injured, killed. Political situations all over the world are moving further and further to the right, even in my home country. I thought it was immoral and wrong to pretend it wasn't going on. At the same time, I didn't know how to talk about it. I was stuck - and wrote nothing. I'm realising now that this wasn't and isn't the way to deal with the situation. To bury my head in the sand won't help anyone or anything. I love to write and the global situation doesn't change that. It might, however, influence the kind of topics I'd like to write about. Travelling is one of my passions, that will never change. But there are a lot of other things close to my heart, and I might want to write about them from time to time as well. I thought I'd write about this mostly as a reminder to myself, should I ever lose sight again of why I'm doing this. Let's raise our mugs to the power of the written word.



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