Thoughts on travel, staying at home, being satisfied, etc.

I love to travel.  I love to get out and see the world.  I love driving in the country and I love walking around big cities.  I love busses, planes, trains...I love going to folk museums, seeing crafty things, art museums.

I love eating food I've never seen before.  I love trying to talk to people who grew up speaking a different language than I did and interacting with people who grew up with different value systems.

I love seeing the world and learning from it and feeling more a part of things.

I love bringing little bits of those amazing places I visit home with me...pictures, niblets of food, memories, tshirts.

I love breathing the air and feeling the sunshine and the rain.

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I remember a conversation I had with my dad many years ago.  He didn't understand why I wanted to travel and go so much. Live so many different places.  He said he was perfectly happy at home and worried that I wouldn't ever find happiness in my home.

I told him travel for me wasn't trying to find a different home but just seeing and learning about things that I couldn't see and learn from my living room.

I love my home.  I love the home where I live and the home where I grew up.  I love the other homes where I raised my babies and grew into a different kind of adult than I was when I started.

 I love that home roots us, gives us a place to "go home to." To belong and feel safe.  Home provides that centripetal force that allows us to experience all those things that we do when we travel.  All the "foreign" things that could have the potential to really set us off our rockers.  But because we are grounded in something we call home, we have the ability to explore, learn, and maybe change too.  Bring those "foreign" things home and help our home grow into something stronger than it was before.

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Being satisfied in my home, the one I'm living in now, has created an amazing freedom of spirit with which I'm approaching this upcoming trip.  I am so excited about leaving and a little sad about leaving.  I've hardly taken the time to plan and prepare for this trip...not because I'm not excited but because I'm so satisfied being where I am that the trip doesn't carry the weight of being that thing my dad feared travel was for me.

Before the divorce I never would have admitted, even thought, that I wasn't happy in my home.  It was a place of refuge and comfort for me.  But I now realize it was also a place of confinement and profound dissatisfaction.  That former home, the one I left only a short 10 months ago, had, in so many ways, begun to imprison me, keep me from developing and growing and exploring.

And all the time, I wanted to get out, see things, do things.

The me now?  I'm so soul satisfied that travel means something even bigger and better and brighter than it did before.  It isn't my "escape from" but my "journey to"...

and the thought of that "journey to"...to a me that hasn't existed before.  To a me that I don't even know yet.  That's so cool and I can't wait for THAT part of my trip.