Pages of a Story: A Winter Walk in Stockholm

I take the blue line, change to the green one in T-Centralen, and go down in Slussen. I glance through the windows of the galleries while walking through Hornsgatan. I was planning to watch the sunset from the viewpoint at Skinnarviksparken but the weather is not on my side and by the time I get there, dark clouds fill the horizon. I sit down on a bench to watch the snowflakes descend.

At five twenty, I go down and walk along the empty sidewalk next to the water. At some point, it stops snowing and I decide to continue my stroll to Gamla Stan, the old city in the center of Stockholm. The view of the Kungsholmen shore is gorgeous. It has been about a year and a half since the last time I passed through here. One gets too caught up in the routine and life goes by fast.

I continue walking to Rådhuset to take the blue line back home. By the time I am halfway, the dense dark clouds completely erase the lights of the Södermalm district. I can barely see the tower of the Stadhuset next to me. A blizzard covers the city on a white veil. My footprints don’t last more than a few seconds and I stop several times to clean the ice from my glasses.

I finally make it to the blue line and I am back in the warmth of my room a few minutes later. The snowstorm continues outside as if it was to last forever. I sit down in front of my desk and find refuge in the pages of my journal.

I like to write. I have been compiling journals for fifteen years. I write to put my thoughts into words and bring structure and clarity to my mind. I write to immortalize my memories, my beliefs, my stories. We are storytellers after all. We need stories to communicate, to give meaning to the world, and to make sense of our existence.

I leaf through the soft ivory paper of my journal and realize how the last months have been embedded into just a few pages. In contrast, when I go further back to my time as a traveler, several pages are needed to capture a single day of wander: the things I do, the places I visit, the colorful streets, and the different tastes and aromas of a new city, and the conversations I have with the people I meet. Paragraphs pile up and my hand write deteriorates as I rush to capture these experiences before they are altered or, even worse, forgotten by my fragile memory.

I look through the window as the ephemeral snow particles dance to the sound of the wind. I don’t want my days to go by helpless, at the mercy of the wind of life. I fear the moment I wake up and realize that decades have passed and I am still the same person.

I think about Memoirs of Hadrian, a novel by the Belgian writer Margarita Yourcenar. On his deathbed, Hadrian writes a letter to Marcus Aurelius, his future successor. The text recounts the wisdom the Roman Emperor has accumulated throughout different episodes of his life. Particularly, Hadrian declares that there are three ways to learn about human existence: through our own experience, through the experiences of others, and through books.

As a travel enthusiast, I cannot help but relate Margarita’s words to traveling.

By traveling, we leave behind our comfort and dive into the unknown. We expose ourselves to different environments and diverge from our beliefs, values, and prejudices. By traveling, we interact with the people we meet. We engage in conversations and dive into their stories. We learn to see the world through their eyes and add their experience to our own. By reading, we travel to different narratives. We learn from the stories of those who lived in distant times. We are entrusted with their stories to make them our own.

And yet all these perspectives remain incomplete. We see the world from the narrow lenses created by the conditioning our environment has provided. Even books carry the prejudices of the pen. Nevertheless, a rich life is born out of the combination of these incomplete stories.

Life is about feeding our stories through new experiences, rich conversations, and good books that change our narratives. To lead a life that cannot be reduced to just a few pages.