social networks | The Traveltelling Animal

As we adjust the chips and wires to try and make our online identities please the social audience’s expectations, as we try to cope with the standard, the conventional, the general struggle for perfection, we tend to have no time to admit failure or weakness. We cannot show it or openly talk about it until, at some point, as some part of our nature deteriorates under the pressure of the stressing habits we impose to it, we end up tricking ourselves into believing that everything is fine.

But then in the chance to widen one´s own perspectives through travels and in the uncorrupted genuine flow of the creative mind, I see the most efficient protest against this psychological anosognosia of our times.

*Anosognosia is a neurological condition (not a psychological one. Allow me the poetic license). The word derives from the Greek nosos, “disease”, and gnosis, “knowledge”, and denotes the inability to acknowledge disease in oneself. Imagine, for example, the victim of a major stroke having the left side of the body entirely paralyzed and yet being completely oblivious of the problem. To the question “How do you feel?”, the patient unable to move even a single muscle in the left part of the body would reply with a sincere “Fine”.

on Gutenberg Universität Campus

“We all are storytellers”, Thomas drank the last sip of his Kupferberg, “we have always been. And life is a tale vaguely based on a real story. But now each and every one of us can have his or her voice heard by an audience”. We left the Kirschgarten and its typically German half-timbered buildings to go to Liebfrauen square, in the proximity of the imposing Mainzer Dom. It wasn’t an ordinary day in the small state capital of Rhineland-Palatinate. On a stage, a group of men in historical costumes was filling a giant wooden barrel with water.

“What are they up to?”, I asked amused. “Every year in June, since 1968 alias the 500th Continue reading →