we all tend to think of travel and adventure as some grand escapade whisking us away to far, foreign, and exotic places - somewhere we can go to escape the monotony of life’s current demands. there, we dream of scenarios that seem realistic enough though all the while very much improbable (for which i’m sure we have hollywood to thank). perhaps through some twist of fate we meet the man/woman of our dreams in all their far, foreign, and exotic glory. or perhaps we stumble across ancient ruins never before discovered. maybe we wrestle with crocodiles, or swim with sea turtles. something new, something daring, something exciting - something simply apart from the ordinary. and while all that does have its (very) tantalizing appeal, we forget how easily we can get suckered into these romanticized notions. but what about all of life’s little adventures? what about that sad, younger sister forever following the footsteps of her much glorified older sibling? so we don’t make new discoveries everyday. or scale mountains. or swim with sharks. so we go to work our 9-5. or 10-6. or 12-8. monotony may hold much infamy, but maybe it isn’t such a terrible thing. even the most daring and the most adventurous of us needs to possess some foundational routine, even if only just a little bit. and as with everything else (and at the risk of sounding like a terribly broken record), life consists of finding that perfect balance between routine and spontaneity. when we get so engulfed in the sea of our routine lives, we tend to overlook all the little things. we then proceed to convince ourselves the only way we could ever pull ourselves out of the “xx-year slump” is by zip lining across the amazon, or buying a red hot mercedes. we all have bad days. and yes, occasionally (or not so occasionally) we have reaaaaally bad days. and in my opinion, we are more than entitled to wallow in our own misery for a reasonable amount of time. we are entitled to feel sorry for ourselves and to cry, and gripe, and moan about how unfair it is that the world is so cruel and how we consistently scrape the bottom of the barrel. everyone is entitled to their moment. but then life goes on. and after we whine like little girls and get it out of our system, we realize things aren’t so terrible. then (at least for me) we walk down the street, buy ourselves a nice sized scoop of molly moon’s homemade ice cream in a giant waffle sugar cone, and accept that life moves on - that we move on. the adventure of life is  this ongoing journey we are all a part of (willingly or not so willingly) and we have this wonderful opportunity to maximize it through relationships and through experiences (ironically, neither of these require a zip line or a shiny red car). it just seems as though 70% of the time, we walk around with our heads in the clouds filled with all these notions of grandeur (90% in my case) and forget that there are those perfect little imperfections that can be grandeur-ish in reality too. sort of.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Mark Twain