Exploring spaces

I think I would have liked being an explorer or pioneer.

I always enjoy travel.  Not necessarily for the destination but for the act itself.  When I go off on a business trip, or a vacation, or just exploring some part of the city that I’ve never been before I get this rush of excitement.

I am leaving behind all that I know.  Taking few if any supplies with me.  For the next hour, or day, or week I am “off the clock”.  All my conventional life, my schedules, my comfort zone.  It’s all back home and I don’t have any of it to lean on.

I am living wild and rough.  Relying on my wits to get me through.  Seeing new sights, hearing new things, thinking new thoughts.

Have you noticed that when you first go to some strange new place it all seems so stark, barren, even dangerous in some ways.  But once you’ve been there and return it’s not so bad the second time and in time it becomes part of your mental map of the world.  I like that feeling of opening up new spaces and bringing it all into my “known world”

Then when you return back home and you see everything you left behind is running as it was when you left.  The comfort zone is there waiting to accept you back.  But yet, you get this feeling that you’ve suddenly just grown a bit for going on this journey.  You have found something that is not back here at home and added it to yourself and you have become (maybe just a little) better than before you left.