Seeing The World New
One thing I know for certain; the more I travel, and the more places I visit, the more I understand where I came from, and the more I learn to appreciate home.
Back in 2000, I boarded my first airplane, making the epic journey from the Canadian prairies to the distance lands of New Zealand and Australia, where I backpacked for two and a half months with my two lovely sisters, Tammy and Tracey.
Being the first time truly away from home, everything was new. I was continually amazed at the different road signs, to the accents, to the products on store shelves, to the native wildlife. While in Australia, I remember the feeling when I saw my first kangaroo, roaming wild in the outback. I thought, “wow, I’m really here!”.
We returned back to Canada a few days shy of Christmas, and I remember clearly one particular morning sitting at my parent’s kitchen table. With a coffee in hand, I gazed across the farm yard that was covered in a white blanket of snow. The landscape was still asleep with the crisp morning air, and quietly a herd of deer, gracefully walked across the yard, each step poking a hole in the white landscape.
My first reaction, was to call the dog to chase them away. But then I thought, “someone from Australia sitting at this table, would be in complete awe at this moment, to see a herd of wild deer roaming across the yard.” It was that moment that I briefly realized, the power of seeing the world new.
As Henry Miller once said, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things”, and the more I travel, the more I understand the truth in that statement.