by Desi Zavatta Musolino

Created on: August 03, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

If you take a trip today to anywhere, what would you take with you?

Only the essential

Sometimes I stare at it, that backpack leant on the wall apparently without life, I would be minded to leave immediately, stuffing it with essential objects and anything else.

Like a lot of time ago, when some curious playmate with his soft voice asked you at school -"What would you decide to carry with you onto a deser island?"-. It is not hard to answer for me, everything is there, in my thoughts and in my experiences. The backpack is capacious, but I do not need a lot, some asset to survive and some tenet. I would leave now, I would be satisfied only with a bundle tied to a tree trunk, if the backpack would not be available.

I do not need anything, but to collect a few comfortable clothes, a pair of handy shoes, just some money for the first days, a notebook with a pen with endless ink and a lot of curiosity.

Light clothes, shoes to the feet, quick check that everything would be ok and ready to go, under the hot sun or under bad weather conditions, because everything helps to make the Trip unforgettable.
I would not want to take any map, I would like to let me take from my keen eye, someone would call it heart, or from the advice of the people I would meet.

During the journey I would have the time to observe the world which surrounds me, the landscape which changes, the clouds which chase themselves in the sky, I would have the time to listen to the life which pulses and the silence which goes with it, I would have the time to imagine myself from the exterior being part of that wonderful world where I live, to look at myself from the high while I walk and get tired, also the exhaustion would be pleasant because everything would be really part of the experience of the Trip.

I would put in practise one of my biggest dreams, putting myself to the test in the world like people used to do in the past, a sort of barter, an exchange au pair between received goods and services and work offered by myself to anyone who could help me to go on with my journey, in that way I would earn the food and the bed for the night and I would get rich of smiles and words of the numerous people who I would meet in a thousand of different situations.

At the end of my days, before giving out for the sleepiness and the physical weariness, I would take out my notebook and my pen with endless ink and I would write down the seen landscapes seen, the heard words, the felt thoughts and sensations, to avoid to forget them forever, also in my oldness, and to give testimony of the beauty of my experience to the new generations of my family.

I would not need anything else for a Trip around the world and into myself.

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