Imagine that, on any given Saturday, a complete stranger walks into your home uninvited.
They smell nice, dress differently, and seem pleasant at first glance. They don’t appear threatening. This self-invited guest looks around without really seeing, their attention scattered; they move with a kind of performed familiarity, as if they understood the place without ever having lived it. They touch objects, take photographs, use whatever is within reach. They form theories through the lens of their own codes and measure what they encounter against standards that simply don’t apply.
They pause to watch the way you cook, open cupboards, scan the structure that holds your home together. They run their fingers over fabrics, flip through the books on your shelves, treating them less as part of a lived life and more as curated artefacts.
They murmur a few words, but you can’t quite tell whether they’re speaking to you or about you, nor whether they like you or not. Everything seems to “amaze” them, yet there is no space for you to be part of the experience.
You begin to feel invisible, hovering on the edge of discomfort, reduced to the backdrop of a scene that exists only in their imagination. There is no real attempt to understand how you live, what this home means to you, or the story behind what they are seeing. They are just passing through, and that seems to be enough.
Then, almost imperceptibly, between one smile and the next, they leave the tap running, as if your water held no value. They make noise when you need rest, because their time is the only one that matters. They pull flowers from your garden, treating living things as something to be consumed. They inhabit your small universe without considering consequences, disregarding any sense of limit.
Eventually, they walk out the door, carrying with them a partial and distorted impression of you and your identity, assembled from random fragments, filling in the gaps with their own narrative, and in doing so, missing the chance to be shaped by other ways of being, doing, and living. Yours, for instance.
But an hour later, another one arrives.
And before you’ve had time to process it, there’s someone new at the door. And another. And another…
Now imagine that this self-invited guest is us, in the destination of our next planned trip.
Because this, too, is what travelling is: entering a place where life is already unfolding, where people are not passing through but rooted, where every everyday gesture, cooking, watering plants, caring for a space, the music playing, the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the fabrics that brush against the skin and cover beds and cushions, forms part of a balance shaped by a lived experience that does not take our way of life as its measure.
And yet, too often, we behave as if all of this were something prepared for our consumption.
We look, we move through, we record, we claim. We say we “love” that corner of the world, while slowly contributing to its transformation into a stage for comforting fantasies, increasingly exotic and predictable, constructed from our own imagination, pushing places into a tension between being reduced to fixed traits and being judged for not matching what we expected to find.
Travelling is not an innocent act, and if we believe it is, it is because we choose not to confront what it implies. It means occupying a place that is not ours, altering a rhythm measured by a different scale, and taking part, however briefly, in a system that will continue long after we’ve gone. And yes, dear friends, that carries responsibility.
We can ignore it, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. Or, perhaps the more sensible option, acknowledge that our presence leaves a trace, and act accordingly, as good neighbours in a shared world, so that what grows from it is not bitter, and places can continue to thrive without being harmed by our passing through.
Throughout my travels, I have made more mistakes than I can remember. Still, at the beginning of each journey, I try to bring my full awareness into the experience ahead. I don’t think sustainability should be framed as something abstract, elusive, or reserved for a few. It is something more elemental, and at the same time more demanding, requiring a willingness and the conscious cultivation of a practiced attitude.
Because when I speak of respect, I am not referring to superficial politeness, but to a quiet awareness of limits. When I think of attention, I mean a genuine willingness to understand what is in front of us. And restraint has to do with moving through a place without the need to adapt it to ourselves or force it into our own shape.
To understand that you are not at home, and still behave in a way that might make you worthy of being there. Even if no one invited you.
