The Tourist Trap

The Hotpot | December 2025 | By Lisanne

Some of us go through life as tourists.

We point at the scenery of our own experience, take a few snapshots, and move on. We forget that the landscape isn’t out there — as one of the most important poets in Portuguese literature Fernando Pessoa reminds us — it’s us.

The universe isn’t ours; it’s what we are made of.

But tourists don’t discover much.
Explorers do.

Explorers aren’t seeking comfort or confirmation. They’re open. Unarmored. They’re willing to feel with their minds and think with their emotions. They’re willing to sit with the discomfort of seeing clearly. They participate in the terrain instead of merely observing it.

Pessoa offers instructions, though they don’t look like instructions at all:

• Feel everything, in every way.

• Think with emotion; sense with intellect.

• Don’t desire out of habit — desire with imagination.

• Use every sensation, but only on the inside.

• Peel it all the way down to the essential… then put it back on the shelf for the world to see.

This is the work: not to understand everything, but to stop trying to understand everything.

To see ourselves the way we see a field — not as something to fix or decode, but simply as something that is.

Because when we stop being tourists of our world, we might become capable of discovery. And what we might discover is what was there all along.