I spent the last two week in New York; it was a study trip that I attended thanks to my school grades that permitted me to have a discount on the trip price.
In these last two weeks I’ve seen the best city in the world, the city shines at every moment in the day, is inspiring and magnificent.
People come from everywhere, Spain, Ecuador, France, Japan, China, India and Italy like me.
In these two weeks I met really interesting people that I thought I would never have known in a different city.
I came home with a different view of the world, and I will always hold tight those lessons that I learned during this period.
People can travel like tourists, to see all the things special that a place has to offer.
Traveling like a tourist is tough, other type of people prefer just to relax and chill on the beach indeed of going around to see museums and local’s art.
I would place myself in a third category, a category of people who travel to understand themselves.
This category is in the middle of the tourist and the chill one, because you need to see a variety of different places and different people that could inspire you, so you have to be a tourist, but at the same time you need time and space to relax and think about what you learned, or everything will be just vanished, so you want to be chill and relaxed.
When you see new cultures, meet new people, eat different food, you start thinking about different things, taking different paths, and worrying about different problems.
When everything around you start to change, you also react to it, and that is the perfect moment to take a deep view inside yourself.
Take a look at yourself, do a self-inspection, how do you react to this new environment and why, analyzing your behavior will give you the answers that you are looking for, or more importantly will give you plenty of new questions to work on.
The environment changes you, your culture does it because is the reason why it has been “created”, to improve the ability of people to cooperate and communicate between each other, and that’s easier if we share the same language, traditions and style.
Meeting other people of a different culture make you question things and behaviors that before you judged normal and usual.
Because everything is profoundly shaped by our environment and what we consider “right” or “bad” in the majority of the cases are just purely part of our perception and culture, something that is far from universal.
Neither the environment is universal, and neither the solution of our problems.
You can’t always solve your problems going away, because the source of those problems will always be with you.
Traveling with respect to it, will be only useful to understand that your problems are not in your environment, but are in you.
You require a deep understand of yourself, and a long time spent self-analyzing yourself and reflecting about how you change.
Traveling eventually, you will start understanding what you love about your ex-environment, and you will eventually start missing it.
The real value of changing environment is meeting new people, this is where all the real changes come from.
Comparing your ideas, sharing different opinions at the end is what make you really change, more than anything else.
Then understanding yourself require understanding others.
But what is the meaning of understanding yourself, does you really need it to leave a happy live?
In these two weeks I stayed in a form room of the Pace University, a university located into The Financial District, in Manhattan.
From the window of my room I could see the beauty of all those building shining in from of me and admiring the vision of the Woolworth Building in from of me.
Lights goes on and off continuously, but the view never stops to be wonderful and inspiring.
Every light in this view is the piece of a perfect landscape.
I would like to be part of this landscape, and be the best light I can be for someone else, until is arrived the moment to leave the room for someone else.
Understanding yourself is what allows you to find the role that you want to have in this landscape, or if you want to be part of it at all.
There are no universal solutions and New York clearly shows it.
I love this city because it has no dogma, considering the definition in ancient Greeks: “a dogma is something that seems true”, in this city nothing seems true, and nothing is considered “absolute”, there are no fixed paths and nothing that seems impossible, you are in New York City, everything is possible.
These two weeks teched me the importance of doing, of putting yourself out of your comfort zone and trying, filled me with curiosity and willing to discover, explore and study more.