When we travel, when we force ourselves to step outside the cage our routine creates, when we escape our securities and for a while allow ourselves to revel in our lack of knowledge, to become a stranger, to feel the unknown and embrace it, things begin to happen.

The world becomes new again.  The earth, the only place we ever called home is suddenly a mystery that we never really knew.  All of the ideas we were so set on become confused.  Our knowledge, once armor, is only a barrier keeping us attached to a way of thinking that no longer applies and we find ourselves lost.  Our spirits, the master adapters, are stripped bare of their securities and become as new and exposed as the new land ahead of us, and we realize we’d never really been introduced.  We find that, just as we do not know the world, we do not know ourselves, and with realization we are presented with the opportunity to discover the people we really are.

It’s weird at first.  It’s uncomfortable to look at yourself in the mirror and only recognize the shell.  You will make thousands of mistakes.  You will take countless wrong turns or find yourself looking for a person that doesn’t exist.  You will be forced to rely on a place within your soul that you didn’t know existed, a part of yourself that had been missing your whole life.

And once we find that person, once we hear that whisper and find that we’ve had all the answers this whole time, we can never go back.  The world becomes small and our potential immeasurable and we realize that we are responsible for defining our purpose.  Once that voice begins to speak we have an obligation to listen, to follow our hearts and see our dreams through.  Sometimes you have to travel a long way to discover the secret you’ve had your whole life, but once you do, you can never go back.  So, leap into the unknown.  Like Alexander Dumas says, “It’s only the first step that’s the hardest.”

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