My Unwritten Book

Traveling is a bittersweet experience. It forces you to trust strangers, embrace the complete unknown, and to lose sight of all the familiar comfort of our normalcy. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the mountains, the sky - all things tending towards to eternal or what we imagine of it. With the newness of all things surrounding you, the senses seem to be on full alert and the adrenaline that follows is intoxicating and, for me, addicting

The emersion back into the ordinary life, however, can be strange and sobering if not careful. Each experience can be easily seen as an escape from life, which puts our normal lives in the light of something to escape from, much like a prison. What benefit is that? Each experience, rather, should be seen as a lesson in how to live our normal lives better. The experiences should stay with us in some way, change who we are, even if subtly, and carry on in us back home. The trick is to identify just how to make this happen. It is deeply personal, it must be intentional, and there are no right (or wrong) answers. So, as I try to figure it all out now that I'm back into the normal routine of things once again, I think of how St. Augustine once said it, "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." I'm so incredibly grateful for this book of many pages and the lessons on how to live my life even better than before.