Wanderlust or Spiritual Loss?

"We are seeing a religious wave rising in almost all of Europe, a wave of religious need and despair, a searching and a profound malaise, and many are speaking of... a new religion to come....Europe is beginning to sense... that the overblown one-sidedness of its intellectual culture (most clearly expressed in scientific specialisation) is in need of a correction, a revitalisation coming from the opposite pole. This widespread yearning is not for a new ethics or a new way of thinking, but for a culture of spiritaul function that our intellectual approach to life has not been able to provide. This is a general yearning not so much for a Buddha or a Laotze but for a yogic capability. We have learned that humanity can cultivate its intellect to an astonishing level of accomplishment without becoming master of its soul."


Hermann Hesse, 1920


Siddhartha is a book about a journey in search of spirituality, of hope and of promise, all of which according to Hesse, is what the human soul is yearning for, to quell the growing restlessness and dissatisfaction we seem to feel, time and time again, a restlessness that no amount of "affirmation of self and enjoyment of sensuality and the possession of the materialistic" be able to soothe.

After almost a year of my casting aside Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, unfinished, back onto my bookshelf, I picked it up again this morning, determined to try again, determined to really read it. Of course I had to start again from the very beginning, but this time round, unlike my first attempt, it took me an hour just to get through the 12 pages that were the Translator's Preface and the Introduction. For within those 12 pages, a disturbing image of my life began to take form... and what I saw both scared and saddened me.

Are my feelings of wanderlust really the desire to explore new places and live a different culture? or a desperate attempt to suppress and control the feelings of restlessness and fill in the hollowness I feel deep inside? Am I suffering from spiritual loss? If I am, then I'm afraid that I will spend the rest of my life never truly happy, never completely satisfied; always having to fight off the beckoning finger of wanderlust, knowing that it would only be a matter of time before I give in, and start life anew in a place that promises a new and exciting beginning... knowing even then that wanderlust hasn't really gone away, but is lying dormant, waiting...