How travel can trigger brain rewiring
Anyone for tranquillity? (Town ?Wengen? as captured by my Pixel 2)
Well well well, an experience to cherish and a moment to live in the stride towards fueling an ambitious career and cultivating a better life is unfortunately cast aside. And since nothing in life is constant including dignitaries like motivation, passion, and determination, it becomes all the more important to get lost, yes, to GET LOST to find that moment.
Rewiring the brain is tough and even a dispassionate unbolted soul needs time to alter his/her life?s perception. I am talking about years, decades here. How do you update your subconscious to send you vibrations of a different frequency when you want to take any decisions? Life is ridiculously easy if we strive to do the things that accord for a sense of satisfaction, persistently. We all know what is good and what is bad for us. But, we lose it out somewhere, someday, some moment. It happens, its natural, its good, its experience. You need a moment to reflect, to pause, to instigate. We all know that nature is a great place to do so, says my conscience and this psychological paper. The reason I push for it is that for someone whom getting out or traveling comes naturally this might be like ?Ahh, why the hell is he explaining this?, but for those whom it doesn?t, I recommend getting out of your comfort zone and engaging in something that you haven?t done before. Believe me, getting out of the comfort zone itself is the tool that?ll help in that brain rewiring affair.
Ta-da, rewiring time; this time it?s in a mountain village called Wengen in the beautiful Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps. Predominantly known as an area of beautiful hikes, Bernese Oberland is nothing less than heaven (I confirmed with a few folks from heaven, they?d come here for a break as well). And, the reasons I chose this town out of all were – car-free roads, gourmet swiss food, mesmerizing views, nearby local cheese huts, world?s best valley round the corner, and probability of stepping on a hiking trail > probability of stepping on a normal road.
Here is that ?round the corner? valley, the town you see below is Lauterbrunnen
?Hey room service, we?ve reached Wengen, can you send someone to rewire our brains?. There you are, you know what to do next? of course, wait for the room service guy to come. But seriousness apart, lets come back to our joke of rewiring. But why do you need this rewiring? Because rewiring for brain is what food is for body. You want to establish new connections in the brain and break the mould to spark creativity, update subconscious, and enable mental growth. Wait, how traveling to such a place helped me do that?
Exploring different cultures is important to see how others perceive the world. Bernese Oberland is in the german speaking region of Switzerland. I ensure interaction with a lot of locals wherever I visit with an eagerness to know more about their beliefs, what they enjoy doing, and importantly what they view as the ultimate purpose of their life. It serves as a great reflection on the way an individual perceives society as every individual even from the same clan is so different given the brain wiring exercises one has experienced in life. Another aspect that I keenly seek for is the origin of the local food/produce and how people become locavores. Did you know that Muesli comes from Switzerland, and having Bircher Muesli (overnight yogurt soaked muesli with berries) for breakfast was the best thing to get my day started. My lunch though would rather be meager compared to other meals as Michelin star restaurants never showed on any of my hiking trails. Swiss chocolate milk, some bananas, and a handful of nuts would sum up my luncheon. But, dinner would always be a three course meal, with the main course including the likes of rosti with fried egg, rissolee with cantadau cheese.
I believe you are already full, both in gut and mind. Quickly touching on another facet of this trip, my exchange with nature. Nature with its mellifluent voice kept on passing a realigning magnetic force through my existing brain wires. Be it the unruffled snow, the stoic bird, the restrained tree, the insuppressible stream, the radiant sun, the ecstatic butterfly, all greeted me with a gracious smile. This subtle attention to detail and curiosity about all natural elements that make up our environment turns on my switch and there go the neurons exploring different unvisited regions of the brain. The snow taught me to be composed, the bird to admire flight and simply ignore the pain in the wings, the tree to not worry about the coming winter (it was ready to be covered with snow for the next couple of months), the stream to just keep going, and the sun to always remain bright irrespective of the circumstances. My ?nature friends? seem to imbibe a different lesson every time I meet them. Guess what, I forgot the butterfly, he just pinged me on whatsapp. Have you ever met anyone enjoying the present without worrying about anything else? That really describes our dear friend ?Butterfly? and the lessons a butterfly teaches in a second last forever.
My friends, colleagues, CEOs of multinationals, presidents of various countries, I mean the people in my close circle, often asked me on why I would travel solo. It would always be hard to recount my experience of traveling with such a large group of ?nature friends?. In my mind, it was just another visit to interact with these ?nature folks? and express my gratitude for having me over at their place.
Brain rewiring as you saw is a very tough and challenging exercise :). It is only for the ones who can bear it all in nature. The ones who enjoy gourmet food. The ones who get out of their comfort zone. The ones who challenge themselves. Do you challenge yourself?
