If there is one toxic pattern I keep seeing among travelers is that they move way too fast, making traveling almost a challenge and sometimes a trauma.

People move way too fast when they travel, which puts their nervous system under such a huge pressure. I’ve recently talked to several people who told me they needed one or two weeks after their trip to recover from it and feel like their normal self again! How odd is that!

You don’t go to travel to wreck your nervous system and put yourself under a daily challenge! You go to travel to spend a good time somewhere else and discover new things and meet new people!

How can you have a good time and discover new things if you keep jumping from one place to another every day or two? How can you enjoy a special site if you don’t take time to sit down, breathe, meditate and watch the sunset?

Some of the places you see, you may see them only once in a lifetime so you need to slow down and learn how to embrace the present moment to become a good traveler.

Don’t ever tell me again about your trip where you’ve seen 6 different cities in 10 days, I don’t wanna hear about that!! 🙂 It is not a travel, it’s a race and as long as you’ll keep doing that, you’ll be playing against yourself because you work against life and you break its FLOW.

Pick a country – pick a city – or two MAXIMUM – and

Stay there,

Let the place sink in,

Let people come to you,

Stop chasing,

Let life reach you,

This how you will get to understand who the people are and how this new place works…

I love this song from Jack Johnson’s album “Brushfire fairytales” where he says…

Slow down everyone, slow down… Because life is not a race, it is supposed to be a delightful walk… And like Jack Johnson says in that song “frames can’t catch you” when you’re moving too fast… Meaning that real life can’t reach you when you’re busy running and escaping from it.

Let life reach you, teach you and show you the way.

Brushfire fairytales
Itsy bitsy diamond wells
Big fat hurricanes
Yellow bellied given names
Well shortcuts can slow you down
And in the end we’re bound
To rebound off of we

Well dust off your thinking caps
Solar powered plastic plants
Pretty pictures of things we ate
We are only what we hate
But in the long run we have found
Silent films are full of sound
Inaudibly free

Slow down everyone
You’re moving too fast
Frames can’t catch you when
You’re moving like that

Inaudible melodies
Serve narrational strategies
Unobtrusive tones
Help to notice nothing but the zone
Of visual relevancy
Frame-lines tell me what to see
Chopping like an axe

Or maybe Eisenstein should just relax

Slow down everyone
You’re moving too fast
Frames can’t catch you when
You’re moving like that

Well Plato’s cave is full of freaks
Demanding refunds for the things they’ve seen
I wish they could believe
In all the things that never made the screen
And just slow down everyone
You’re moving too fast
Frames can’t catch you when
You’re moving like that
Slow down everyone
You’re moving too fast
Frames can’t catch you when
You’re moving like that
Moving too