An invitation to live - You are cordially invited to attend your Once in a Lifetime Trip.

Morning. You wake up. Your surroundings as always, are familiar. You push your body off the high mattress and drag yourself on all fours to the stairs. You go down the same stairs from the gallery upstairs to the bathroom downstairs, wash your face and look at a face furrowed and glistening with old women's white fluff. Yes. Very soon you will die.

In the kitchen, you stand in exactly the same corner, at the same angle, making yourself the same breakfast you have been preparing for decades; cooked quinoa in a bowl of sliced banana, dates and nuts, all mixed with smooth Chia seeds that have been soaked in water for exactly twenty minutes. And you, in a kitchen that is not yours, look at that same corner and say: Just another day.

With your breakfast bowl, you go to your chair, placed as always, in front of a screen that is displaying the same content it displayed yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago and a decade ago. One video tells the story of a wanderer carrying his home on his back, and another tells of a new beginning in an old house in distant lands. You want that too. Just like every day, you open your inbox, but contrary to your lack of expectation from the inbox, you find the following letter:

Invitation:

"Dear Me,

You are cordially invited to attend your Once in a Lifetime Trip, to be held as soon as possible. We know you never got to go on your tour of the world after your army service and that was because you were told that you had to work from dusk 'til dawn to earn respect and a bit of money. But now, dear Me, time is running out, you already have one foot in the grave and before you die you must define, once and for all, who you are. Come. Get rid of your belongings, put them away, sell what you can, detach yourself from your beliefs and go on the Journey of Your Life."

You take your feet off the table and straighten up. Could this be a message from the wanderlust? Could this be the last call to the gate to the rest of the world? In any case, you, a creature of habit, a dreamer of dreams, a cautious being who is burning with desire, must promise yourself that before you disappear completely you must take a stick in your hand, strap a backpack to your back and start wandering.

Preparing for the once-in-a-lifetime- trip

Photo courtesy of Eyal Rotman

Photograph: Amir Goldstein