Can a trip change your life?
We often talk about a journey that changed our lives but, it is a recurring and pleonastic phrase, or an experience of this type can really change our destiny.
As in every human affair, the wisest answer is: it depends. we know very well that different human beings have different sensitivities and life's opportunities are not linear or calculable a priori.
A more likely answer could also be: the more you travel and the more opportunities to change your life you will have. Just reconnecting to this last sentence, an article that talks about the experience of Paul Stoller jumped out at me, very beautiful in its descriptive poetics and in the possibility of dreaming of a life spent in one's passion in a place that one did not know before. Find the complete article, in the language of Albion, at this links
The protagonist
Paul Stoller an ordinary man a journey not just any
Once, in a thatched-roof spirit hut in the Nigerian village of Tillaberi, the master sorcerer Songhay Adamu Jenitongo told the American anthropologist Paul Stoller that the savannah was angry. “People who speak with two mouths and hear with two hearts anger the spirits of the savannah,” said Adamu Jenitongo. “When the bush is angry, it doesn't rain enough. When the bush is angry there is too much rain. When the bush is angry, the locusts eat our crops. When the bush is angry, disease kills our people."
Songay Adamu Jenitongo
Today Stoller is a professor of anthropology at West Chester University, a permanent fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the author of 15 books.
His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology, awarded every three years by the King of Sweden. He is also what the Songhay call a Sohanci benya, a healer who has not inherited his powers but has been taught to him – often by a prisoner or enslaved person or, in Stoller's case, by a cultural anthropologist from the United States who studied the medicinal properties of plants used in Songhay ethnomedicine.
Stoller ended up apprenticing with Adamu Jenitongo for 17 years. He explained his teacher's comment as follows: "His thought was that when things are out of balance, when there is no balance, when there is no harmony in social relationships, then we suffer as human beings." Who could deny the lack of harmony in social relations today? It seemed time to ask Stoller, whose 16th book, Wisdom from the Edge of the Village: Writing Ethnography in Troubled Times, due out next spring, about what he has learned in his long career, about the phenomenon of “possession of spirits” and what wisdom we can draw from the villages and people he studied.
From what has been written above we can understand the power of an experience, not just any experience, I acknowledge it, a changed and ever changing life.
In this case, there is the feeling that there has been a conjunction of planets with an extremely low statistical case, but let's think calmly. In reality, Professor Stoller, before meeting the holy man, was already a trained man with a very high propensity for knowledge. Many of us could identify with the same type of person. A trip is the sum of many factors or the result of a single superficial factor.
The difference between being a "tourist" or a "traveller".
I chose this story because it united several elements in which to recognize and shareable. Being a traveler means getting confused with a place you didn't know before, because you share its values or, more simply, there isn't a rational reason.
The heart has hyperscrutable eyes and reason prepares for it half-logical paths to follow; we could define them, in many cases, as real jokes.
We should be ready for these jokes and help Destiny by traveling more and more often, to match what we are with what we could be and continue to do so.
We at AILoveTourism define this spirit of knowledge in travel: becoming Geeky tourists; we will talk more and more often about similar experiences to Professor Stoller.
If you have a similar story to tell or want to build your own holiday Traveler who wants to know: WRITE US AT: info@infoailovetourism-com
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