This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 4:07 am and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Is it perhaps the case that few people really appreciate the size, scope and beauty of the world because they have been socialised out of it? Throughout school and, for those who finish tertiary education, you are dictated your world by others. By parents, by teachers. By your peers. And this, possibly, extends beyond formal education. We are a species that, excluding our pioneers, generally likes limits.
Often not dictated to us explicitly, but rather implied in what is left out. How many compare notes with one another and you around jobs, cars, salaries – yet how many have ever expounded on the value of travelling off into an unknown sunset? If you hear about travel or exotic places, it is so frequently framed as being frivolous, or as something ‘out there’, ‘exotic’, or done by others.
There is no physical limit to the world you can see. Only the mental limit to how willing you are to leave your bubble and go. And keep going. And that is really the tragedy. That places and people, stories and experiences – whole worlds, in fact, that you never even dreamed, are right there. Tantalisingly close in reality. Tantalisingly far in your mind.
