If you live in fear… you will never live.
When you travel, you are living one of the finest ways.
Nothing that was ever done with monumental or lasting influence was done by someone who sat idly by or “let things happen.”
(Great sky today, yes?)
The leaders of the world who have actually made some sort of difference – both names you’d recognize and other names you never will hear – were great and did great things because they said, “Now I will do this” and they did it.
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There are those in the world who seek to know. They seek to explore and find things.
They ask and go and touch and smell and taste and stand in the places where great things have been done, great people have stood.
Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? The most powerful questions in the universe.
Those who live in fear will fail. Because they will likely never begin.
Those who live to instill fear in others will fail. Because the human spirit will outlast them, the fear they live in, and the things they seek to destroy.
Some things happen to you, some things you happen to them.
Some things, you just must go out and find out for yourself.
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My fellow travelers and I chose to live. As cliche as it may be, life is too short to spend it vegetating in front of a computer, glued to a television, locked in a cubical, sitting in a classroom…
Do you know what those holes in that wall (above) are for? We do.
In fact, we were standing in the shadow of a holey wall while being told.
Who cares about holes in walls? I don’t know. But isn’t it kind of fun to know?
What is it like to walk around these markets and be hassled by the salesmen? How many languages to they Rolodex through trying to get your attention? What does a monkey smell like? Do they like Nature Valley or Kashi granola bars? Do the olives in Morocco taste the same as the canned ones in the grocery stores in the States? What does it sound like to be in a room lined with oriental rugs? Does camel leather feel different than cow hide leather when it is straight out of the dying vats? Why are all the graves facing the same way? Was this mosaic really placed by hand? How many people can walk down the world’s narrowest named street shoulder to shoulder?
Unless you travel, you may never know. But as for my friends and I, we do…
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
