One of my best friends has flown in for the week, so she can spend some quality time with my other best friend and me. We’ve jam-packed a weekend full of touristy spectacles and gotta-do-at-least-once-adventures. We’re so happy to show her the area because she showed us her town only a few years before. So, we’ve had some time to amass a list of places we had to take her to when she arrived to our domicile, mixing our favorite hangouts with the must-see attractions. We figured we did pretty well, but then again, she has nothing to compare it to.
However, as we discussed our itinerary together, I started to realize that I had not even been to the places that we were planning to go to, and I have lived here my entire life.
What gives? I asked myself. Why hadn’t I visited places that were a mere half hour from me, places that I had heard about but never visited? What was I waiting for?
The answer is nothing. I’ve simply been doing what everyone, everywhere does. You put off going somewhere, anywhere really, until a special occasion. You zip out to foreign waters for vacation, discovering new places and having new experiences. But the cute little shopping village only one town over is still on your “to do” list. You figure, if you are going to have a vacation, you are going to go somewhere. The problem is that people don’t realize they don’t need to go far to have an adventure. They’ve lived in one place their entire lives, but they don’t really know what it’s all about.
So, what should you do? Well, you need to make an excuse. I know, counterintuitive, right? But you need to make an excuse in order to excuse yourself from your daily responsibilities. So that you can visit or do something you’ve never done before, simply in the spirit of doing something new. For me, it took one of my friends to come on a plane for me to decide that I should do something a bit different and live outside of my little box. But if I wait for her each time, well, I’ll be spending a lot of time waiting. This way, if I start now, I can at least have something new to show her and share with her when she comes again.
In the end, we all need to make time for ourselves sometimes. But more than that, we need to make excuses. We need to tell ourselves that it is A OK to visit somewhere just because it is there or do something because we want to. The point is, we should all try to see an old place in a new way so that we can all see ourselves in a new way too.
Bailey Dailey 