I'm Reading Again

I've stumbled on (in a book recommended by a very cool chick) perhaps the best description I've ever found about why I feel the way I do about travelling.

I read it and I thought-- This is it. THIS is why I love to go places. He verbalized something I'd never even been able to fully work out in my own mind.

And now I'm sharing it with you.....



".....I open my journal and stare.....and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry-- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph-- ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience-- buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello-- become new all over again."


~Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

Tunnel Vision

I started thinking on the drive home tonight about how we are completely surrounded most days by people's dreams. That car your driving? There is some car designer man out there that spent countless hours trying to make that car into something amazing.....that car is the manifestation of countless hours of work. And the roads you're driving on? Those are in the pattern that someone, somewhere started imagining one day. And that rotting old house you drive by every time you go to see your grandparents? Some farmer 100 years ago built that with his bare hands and couldn't wait to move his family in.

Every business you go to started off as someone's dream. Every movie you go to started off as a writer's dream. Every song you hear is someone's words pouring out of the radio. Your new dress started as a doodle on someone's notepad. Your old couch was once someone's baby for months and months while it was being designed and developed. This computer I'm on......this website YOU are on......the list is endless.

It is so easy to forget. EVERYTHING is someone's baby-- the product of their hard work. We are all connected....our dreams are all connected by everything we do every day. We are surrounded by the hard work and dreams of people who have a million different interests and most days we are blind to it all. We take it for granted and ignore each other.

Just take a second tomorrow and take a second look at all of the things you look at but don't see every day. It's kind of fun.