|A Passport & Way Out|
The title of this entry may confusing for some; Let me explain..
Fernweh is a German word which literally means "Farsickness" or "Longing for far off places". You may have heard the more common word used to describe this which is Wanderlust.
wan·der·lust
(Noun) A strong desire to travel.
I realized at a young age that it was something I wanted. While other kids were asking for new toys I would ask my mom for trips. I would pretend that my yard was an African Safari and hunt squirrels ( never actually catching any). I'd watch the Mary-Kate and Ashley Movies, Like Passport to Paris and Winning London, and then go in my room to act out the movies word for word like I was actually in these far off places and those movies where just dramatizations of my life. It's a shocker I didn't take up acting, My mom should've pushed it. And now, I'm about to graduate high school,leave for college; I know I should be more excited. I mean I'm finally done! Over 12 years of being locked in a building for 8 hours with people I hate and getting fed worse than a prisoner on death row, all gone. But it went by so fast now that I think back and it makes me wonder. What would it be like, to just quit school and travel the world. Go all the place I've always dreamed about and more. Maybe I would learn more that way.
It's such a weird feeling. To be in love with these places I've never even been to. I've never stepped foot out of America, but I know. I know that this is what I need to do in life. To see all these place in real time. I'm tired of looking at pictures and dreaming I was there. I'm tried of telling my parents that I want to do this instead of wasting away at an in-state university and they just say okay, maybe you can study abroad for a semester. Just wait a few years. But the thing is, I've wait 18 and I'm tired of waiting.
It scares me sometimes. I look around in this small, (quite closed minded) shithole of town I live in and I realize that this could be my life. I could be locked down in this place with an education that won't give me anything more than a stressful nine to five job and a pool of debt to drown in. I don't want that. I don't want to stay home because other countries can be dangerous, So can my backyard but I still go out there. Yeah, it would be great to settle down, have a family one day, and a good education with a stable job. That all sounds peachy, but that's not what I want. At least not right now. All I really want to do is spend my life traveling. I want sip tea in every country. I want to try new foods and swim in waters I've never seen before. I want to be able to write about the great things I've seen. I want stories that I can tell my grand children one day; about how I had to stay in this shady hostile this one time because money is tight when you travel and how I spent my birthday one year with lions in Kenya. I want to make new friends in every country so when I die my funeral will be over capacity. I want to lay in bed when I'm 90 years old and I want to be able to look back on my life and feel satisfaction. To know that I did everything with my life that I wanted and even if I didn't, I filled the space with new places.
With that said, I leave you with this. Until next time XO...
" I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music,culture,food,water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about, i'm sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consist of walking twelve miles for four buckets of water. and so there are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. a lot of people - Americans and Europeans- come back and go, "ooh". and the light bulb goes on". Henry Rollins
0 comments:
Post a Comment