My word is livelust. This is a branch off of an actual word “wanderlust” which is defined as: a strong desire to travel. I love traveling, and I definitely have a very strong feeling of wanderlust, but what overrides that is my desire to live somewhere that I’ve traveled. I want to move across the world to an unfamiliar place where I don’t know the language and have to adapt to the strange and/or different culture. This desire grew as I began to travel to Europe with my family starting summer of sophomore year of high school. I felt this intense urge to stay forever in the ancient streets of Paris and London where I traveled, and going back home seemed almost painful. It was only inflamed more after my month long Europe trip with my best friends last summer, as I actually could have shed a tear leaving our apartment in Barcelona the morning it was time to hop on a plane back to our families.
I know others out there feel the same about this topic as I do. There is a reason people pick of their safe and settled home in the states, and do something crazy like move to Peru. It is almost like an itching for something different and exciting, and something that moving domestically really doesn’t fulfill. I searched the Internet in hopes to find someone that shared the same outlook as me, but since there is no actual word for the way I feel, you could imagine it was very difficult.
I did, however, come across an article on a website called Minimalstudent.com, entitled, “5 lessons learned from a year living in a foreign country.” Although the article as a whole was not very relatable to my circumstance, lesson number four definitely struck home. The author Jessica explained lesson number four as “You won’t get a good view just looking through the keyhole.” That hit home for me because it puts in one sentence, how I feel every time I go on vacation to a foreign country. Jessica writes, “…only doing it for a short while doesn’t mean you know what it’s like. You can’t just blitz through 5 countries in 10 days and expect to have gotten to know the people and culture.” I could not agree more with what she writes. As I trudge around London for six day, I cant help but have in the back of my mind the thought that all I am seeing is what the tour guide wants me to. I loved seeing Big Ben, and going on the London Eye (photo below), but what I really want is to truly understand what its like to live in London. Not visit. Live.
My livelust is intensely internally rock solid inside of my mind.
“The Wanderlust has got me… by the belly-aching fire” -Robert W. Service
London Eye
Big Ben
Varsailles
among the trees 