Asking BIG questions in Italy

Parma, Italy

July 2023

I am on a train from Pavia to Parma, Italy in the northwest region of Emilia-Romagna. It is day 5 of the Via Francigena, and a day of travel by train to leap forward in order to reach Rome (mostly by foot) in 26 more days.

As I stare out the window, my legs tired and relieved to be FINALLY sitting, my mind skeptically taunts and questions if there is ANY intrinsic meaning in the long walk behind me, and the long walk ahead.

In the silence I question, "What am I doing?"

Walking to walk?

Traveling to travel?

Onward to the next city, village, town, trail....each day digging in with GREAT

effort to climb the hills in the hot sun, while feeling the soreness of my feet and shoulders, and the itch of last night's latest mosquito bites.

As we pass through a small town I return my gaze to outside the train window. I watch the locals in their well-established lives - in their homes, communities, jobs, in the flow of their routines.

Me? I am doing nothing today except entertaining deep philosophical reflections about what living life is really all about, anyway.

I wonder... What have I gained in this chapter of my life as a back-packing Nomad? What have I gained that I could not have gained living one of the well-established lives now playing outside my window?

Perhaps nothing, I concede.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, the answer is in the question.

Perhaps, from my Nomad vantage point, I am now asking questions that would never have occured to me had I not walked this path; questions that are now a part of my (back-packing) Nomad perspective.

Certainly I now see my old pre-Nomad life completely different than how I perceived my life at the time. In retrospect I was so busy back then, and too preoccupied to spend much time in that place where the BIG questions live; where the questions are that make you ask WHY you are doing what you're doing with your life.

Instead I was just "doing," and not a lot of "being." I am grateful to BE here now, with my tired legs and sore shoulders, questioning the meaning of it all.

So perhaps traveling to travel, wandering to wander, living to live...doesn't have to have a direct intrinsic purpose for me to find GREAT value in the journey. I am grateful to have broken my trance and to have found a life that prompts me to ask the BIG questions.

So today, as I finished my train ride, I concluded that it doesn't matter if my life is in a village or on a train or in the corporate world. Or if I walk for the next month with no greater purpose than to experience the journey. But what does matter to me, is that I keep seeking to live a life full of the experiences that keep me as awake, connected and alive as I possibly can be, and most of all, that I keep asking those beautiful BIG QUESTIONS.

Namaste. Ciao.