To search beyond, to see new places, to drift and meet other drifters, to open up, to embrace the strange, uncomfortable, misunderstood and to feel inspired. That is the purpose of Deesh Dash

What if what we think we want turns out not being what we want? What if what we think we need is not really what we need?

Before even being able to formulate these questions, is a sense of lingering insatisfaction. You start out with simple goals and aspirations. You work towards them and achieve some of them. When you do, you feel happy for a minute (a day, a week, a month…). Yet the solace and fulfillment you thought you’d experience durably is somewhat disappointing and invariably fades away, leaving a small void, a tiny hollow space in your soul. This is all faint and quite intangible at first. It doesn’t matter much, not enough to take the time to reflect and ask yourself why this is. You just immediately substitute your former goals with new ones, usually larger, deeper into the same general direction. You reach those. This time around, the satisfaction is slightly less intense and lasts for yet a shorter time. The void grows proportionally. This motivates you to increase the pace. Let’s reach further, get bigger, better, more of it (whatever “it” is). Before you realize it, you’ve been on that goose chase for years. You feel confused and insatiable. There seems to be no end to that model yet you start getting the uneasy intuition that more is not better, higher is not more fulfilling, richer is increasingly less rewarding… There seems to be no answer… instead another much more troubling question arises: what if we have been asking ourselves the wrong questions all along? What if our thoughts were not really ours? What if we'd been conditioned to think that way?

We wonder, when did this start? How much of these goals, these ambitions, these milestone of success and accomplishment were really my own? We have reached independence. Questioning our own free will is just preposterous. The mere possibility that we were not entirely in control for all those years, in our careers, in our lives, in the pursuit of our happiness, is so scary that we would rather dismiss it with laughter at best, acid scorn at worst. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul”. Yet there is a secret room in our soul where we keep all those doubts and questions, while we keep chasing some intangible finish line. When we reach it we’ll have “made it”. When we have that job, when we have that house, when we reached such social status, when we have so much money in the bank… we’ll be arrived. But that destination is permanently elusive, constantly one step away, one step ahead… Meanwhile, the secret room in our mind gets increasingly cluttered. More questions. More doubts. It starts spilling out, as if we had left a tap open in the bathroom and the water was overflowing. New goals, larger, ever more ambitious are no longer enough to even generate the excitement they used to. It’s just an automated process by now. Sometimes we wonder, do our friends, our family notice? Does anyone notice? Are we the only one to feel that way? When did this start? We try to remember… It seems we can’t... It’s as if it were in our DNA, deeply embedded in our brain.

Some of us find the only way to cope is to start running… to escape our own mind. We hit the road. We travel… but we can never shake the restlessness off… we are not travelers, we have gypsy souls… then one day at long last we realize: there is no destination, no finish line! We are finally done mourning the prize and accolade we thought we were supposed to chase… we finally understand that movement is the whole point, both the question and the answer. The metamorphosis is complete, we have become drifters.