Today, I arrived in Taiwan. The journey getting there was not that comfortable – I took two flights overnight, so I lost a lot of sleep. But as soon as I arrived, and I took that train from Taoyuan Airport to Taipei City… I felt energised.
As I saw the jagged landscape of the mountains surrounding Taipei, interspersed with the tall, concrete boxy buildings… I felt some warm feeling of familiarity. In reality, there couldn’t be a place more different from where I grew up. Australia is flat, dry and sparse, at least the part that I grew up in. It has a different charm of its own… but somehow I felt connected to the views unfolding before me on the other side of the train window.
Immediately I felt compelled to capture the magic of the moment. So I took out my phone and started recording. Photos, videos, from different angles, at different moments in time… somehow it did not feel enough. I felt unsatisfied. It seems a constant search for me – trying to capture how I am feeling with images, or words, or film…
Since resolving to start my YouTube channel, I have been thinking more often about what to record and how I could put it all together. I have a vision in my mind, which I know will never be met by the tools and experience I have… and it is a little frustrating. How could I possibly convey to people that magic feeling?
I kept recording anyway.
Soon, I arrived at my destination and I started walking. I planned to meet my friend at a particular exit gate, but the signage was not as straight forward as I had hoped. I took my time, and I ended up walking here, there and everywhere.
The feeling of nostalgia kept coming back. The smells reminded me of the food I had tried for the first time all those years ago. The cafes and streets and scenes of people getting on with their day brought back lots of memories, not only of Taiwan but also of living in Singapore.
During this time, I kept trying to record… as if I was chasing something. Trying to pin down and put on display something that was being elusive. After a while I felt that I was getting nowhere, so I decided to put my phone away for a moment.
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that the magic of a moment simply cannot be summed up. I can try to show it to others in photos, stories, or moving images, but they will only make of it what they want.
So after I put my phone away, I looked around and I took it all in.
Sometimes, maybe even most times, I just want to take the moment in for what it is. This is truly why I love travelling – it brings together feelings of contradiction. There you are, existing in a country that is so different from what you are used to… yet, you may feel as if you’ve already been there a hundred times before. There is something simultaneously foreign and familiar about exploring new places, and that, for me, creates that magical feeling.
It’s natural to want to hold that feeling, and to share it with others… but truly, moments are waiting to be experienced. Not to be held captive within a certain form, and packaged and delivered to others. Although the beauty about just experiencing something, is that it helps you to create art from the moment.
And even though whatever you create could never be truly representative of how you felt, if you let it be what it is then it will end up creating a different kind of magic… all of its own, for someone else.
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