Epiphany addict

The start of a gap year experience isn’t usually set at the very date of the departure. Building expectations of the journey starts way ahead and already bears the seeds of expectations and travel. In the case of our gap semester, one unspoken expectation was the idea that our journey should bring some sort of epiphany. Indeed, we didn’t envision a complete gear shift of lifestyle without expecting to learn a thing or two from it… Now that we are a few weeks in, we can fully express this expectation and take a step back from it. It appears that such life shifts can indeed bear many insights about ourselves and our expectations towards life but not necessarily drastic epiphanies. The very fact that we had such expectations speak more of ourselves than of gap semesters in general. I would personally tend to take a «learning from all things» stance towards such experience. But this can reveal itself to be noxious as it puts us always in the expectation of an epiphany, a huge change in the way we perceive life. For one, we may not be compelled to always modify the way we live but we might also not want to cling on very drastic changes and rather progressively, one brushstroke after the other.