A is for All Aboard

I dream of travelling. I would love to live a life of adventure and discovery. I’ve spent so much of my life learning of different cultures and places that I’d like to explore. And yet I never manage to get very far.

I take one real vacation a year with the time I painstakingly save up from work. Every year my friends all come together and go to the same place. All of us bring our costumes, and gear, and tents, and booze and set up our camp for a week or two together. All of us. All together.

It’s a wonderful time but when rifts develop it’s difficult to enjoy it all. Things change. People change. And eventually nothing is really the same. The joy the brought me back year after year, slowly slips away until finally I long for a change of my choosing. I think that’s the problem. Often change is out of my hands. Against my will. It’s hard to watch the things you love get swept up and swept away in the whirlwinds of time. It makes me feel helpless and resentful of my humanity.

Even change of my choice is not easy. The anxiety that accompanies picking a new path is paralyzing. They’ll be so disappointed if I do not join them again like I always do. I never feel like I contribute to their merriment but I never feel like I’m good for much of anything despite what everyone tells me. I’ll be sad and maybe a bit jealous to let them have their fun without me. To think that they could have an even better time if I weren’t there.

But I know what that place holds. I crave something new. Something different. It’s so strange though. Dozens of us do this every year. I want to try something new… but with who?

Sometimes you have to let your past go, to see what your future will bring I suppose.