When I was younger, I would go to secondhand shops with my mom. While she browsed antiques, I would inevitably buy random things like a bank in the shape of a gorilla carved from a coconut from someone’s Hawaiian vacation or little wooden kimono dolls from Japan. I secretly wondered if it was a bit weird to be collecting discarded souvenirs reflecting other people’s travel memories, from places I’d never been to and would probably never go, but thinking all the while, “Maybe someday?” For years I would hold onto those someday dreams, knowing how tragically far my everyday was from the exotic worlds represented in those items.
Perhaps, if I’d been around other cultures at an earlier age, it may have all simply seemed much less magnetic. For girl growing up on a farm, I had a strange and insatiable impulse to immerse myself in the world waiting beyond all that I knew. I took every opportunity I could to learn about it and interact with it – not realizing then how this simple, but powerful curiosity could eventually take me to the ends of the Earth.
I distinctly remember going to a high school camp with students from everywhere from inner city St. Louis to Egypt in attendance. My instinct was and still is to look for the person or groups least like myself and start a conversation. The international students probably remember me as ‘that girl’ as I would continually find them around camp and ask them with all sorts of questions about their lives, cultures and countries.
Was it stalker-esque? Probably. But, it was my first chance to learn about foreign culture directly from someone instead of just in books – and I couldn’t contain myself. I remember a Kenyan student telling me about the custom of young males coming to age by killing a lion. Como se whaaat? I was spellbound and wide-eyed.
Over the years, I’ve taken every opportunity available to me to travel, learn and talk with strangers from strange lands. I’ve gone on volunteer trips to Latin America, studied abroad in Panama, backpacked Europe after college, traveled for work and have ventured off on a number of solo adventures.
With every single journey and subsequent interaction, I’ve gained invaluable perspective and understanding while becoming a better and truer version of myself. Traveling this brilliant planet has irreversibly changed me. And, my vague dreams of adventure have been slowly replaced with a vivid, previously unfathomable reality. I’ve now been to six continents and 60 countries, a feat that this farmer’s daughter could have hardly imagined as a kid.
With so many places and cultures seen and after living in large, diverse cities, I now know this wanderlust pulsing through my veins is as undeniable as the color of my eyes. While I grew up outside a town of 100 people, my destiny was found in wandering the world and exploring its seven times seventy-seven wonders. Yet, this vast landscape I’m now inhabiting didn’t exist until I wished it into being from a purely whimsical place and then allowed it to take a conscious and permanent hold in my day to day reality.
From an early age, I began engaging with new cultures knowing intuitively that what seemed like bizarre worlds so far away could somehow become familiar. I had a vision that a bus or a bridge or a boat or a plane (or a conversation) could unite those worlds which mostly existed in my head…. Worlds which someday could be seen with my own eyes, touched with my own hands and experienced intensely with the whole of my senses.
Strangely enough, I still have those secondhand souvenirs even though I’ve now spent countless hours working and traveling in Asia and Hawaii… exploring with local people, going on remote treks and meandering along incredible beaches. On the Big Island, I even witnessed a mystifying “night rainbow” sitting end to end atop a live lava flow under a full moon. With waves crashing all around me, I listened to new earth sizzling as it cooled beneath my feet. Years later, my husband mentioned going to Hawaii and I was like, (sigh) “Let’s go somewhere else… I’ve been there like six times already.”
Oh, if the sixteen-year-old version of myself could just hear me now! I firmly believe that if we allow ourselves the luxury of our dreams, work hard and greet the world with arms wide open, life can be infinitely more wondrous than we could ever have imagined.
So, get out there and get to chasing whatever it is that’s been chasing you. Your dream is not the illusion. The only illusion is that what you desire is not attainable. Trust me, I know!
ChasingDaylight24/7 