#LoveMe Challenge – feeding my soul

For today’s #LoveMe Challenge, I am sharing something that feeds my soul. I thought a lot about this topic. The usual suspects like love and health have been a bit scarce lately. And my soul is pretty agnostic these days so the concept of organized religion doesn’t really nourish me. In fact, I usually get sad when I see what humans do to other humans in the name of religion.

For me, what really feeds my soul is travel. When I travel, especially when I travel solo, I’m exposed to so much more than what is my normal circumstances. I meet people who come from a very different place in the world and give me a perspective on life, history, relationships that I never would have if I hadn’t left home. At my heart, I think I’m a gypsy sometimes.

I spent a summer after my foray into the working world backpacking around Europe. I had spent years dreaming of foreign countries, new foods, strange currencies, and stamps in a passport. For someone whose only vacations growing up were camping excursions to a campground an hour away in Ohio, any place other than the Midwest seemed so exotic and faraway. My Eurail ticket was a ticket to anywhere I wanted to go on the Continent (as long as it was part of the Eurail plan). Those were the days before the Euro, when every border crossing was met by uniformed guards who randomly plucked passengers off the train, examined passports and gave that satisfying thunk with the stamp. It was the age of exchanging one funny money for another and trying to do the calculations in your head to discover that the Diet Coke really did cost more than an entire bottle of French wine in France. It was the age of the flipping train station schedule boards. That noise of the numerals flipping can take me back 20 years in a heartbeat. It was the pre-internet age where if your beat-up copy of Let’s Go didn’t mention the random town your bus broke down in, you set off for parts unknown, hoping to find a hostel that was somewhat clean and safe for the night and usually adventure would find you.

Over the years, I traveled to Nicaragua, Iceland, Argentina and other spots on the globe that looked enticing. I used to have a world map that I would study with the zeal of an explorer. But somewhere in San Antonio, my travel bug was tamped down, my gratification for new adventures delayed. I was so unhappy looking at my passport gathering dust, but thinking I was saving money for another purpose. And looking at how life turned out, I feel, in quiet nights of self-reflection, slightly bitter about not taking the trips I’ve so carefully planned in my head.

Travel really does seem to nourish my soul. Even when some of my travels have gone completely in directions I never expected, I am still enthralled with the whole experience. Finding out I had cancer, potentially a very aggressive form of cancer, was a huge stop sign to all those plans I had “for the future”. Suddenly, I was thinking that I might not get to the A’s – Africa, Asia, Australia, Antarctica… And that, even more so than anything else that my mortality lesson made me realize, was the saddest thing. I didn’t want to die saying, I need more time. I want to die saying YES! What an adventure I had.

With that being said, I am going to make time, find the money, do what I need to do to get my SPF-covered self somewhere new and exciting in the world. I have five states left to see. It would be a shame to not cross all of them off when I’m so close. I have airline miles gathering dust. Why am I not using them? I need to get back that adventurous spark, the one that looks at the world with curiosity rather than cynicism. In short, I need to get back out there…