This week I celebrate one year of leaving the States and starting this strange journey.
This week I also grieve with my family at the loss of my youngest cousin who passed away unexpectedly last Thursday evening. She would have been 21 years old at the end of this month. When people ask me what I was most scared about (and possibly still am) before starting this journey, it was two things. The first was missing out on important events with family and friends. I’ve missed weddings of best friends, birthdays and anniversary parties, and new babies being brought into this world that I can’t wait to meet. Those were expected and planned for. I hoped that there wouldn’t be a funeral while I was gone, but life is full of unexpected events, sometimes tragedies like this. And this, this has been the hardest time to be away from family. However, part of traveling is making new friends and new families along the way. I have been lucky enough to be with a good friend in Barcelona. We spent the weekend with their family, who took amazing care of me during this rough time. While I wanted to be home with my family more than anything this weekend, it was comforting to be with a family as loving and caring as this one. The other fear I had before leaving was of myself. That I wouldn’t be able to do this. That I wasn’t smart enough, brave enough, or just plain good enough to last an extended period of time traveling solo. Ten years ago, my cousin had those same fears about going to university. The kicker? She was only TEN YEARS OLD. I had just entered university, and she had plenty of questions for me about the difficulty of college. She thought that school was hard already. How would she ever be able to make it to college to study her dream of architecture? I reassured her that school only gets progressively harder, and by the time she got to university she would be more than ready to pursue her dream. Two years ago was the last time I saw my cousin. I was on a business trip to Houston where she was attending the University of Houston and studying architecture. I beamed with pride as she showed me around her campus, labs, and all the projects she was working on. Secretly I remembered our conversation years ago and thought about what would have happened if she had let those fears stand in her way. I’ve thought a lot about my cousin’s fears this weekend and I thought about my own (now somewhat ridiculous in hindsight) fears. Fear can come in all shapes and sizes. It can stop us from talking to people around us, moving forward with a decision, and, worst of all, it can stop us from living the life we really want. That could have happened to my cousin. It could’ve happened to me. It could happen to you. When someone passes so young, you realize that we only have so much time to do what we love. I know I spend a majority of that time making excuses of why I can’t do those things. I’m tired of hearing excuses. I’m even more tired of making my own excuses. It was scary to leave my comfortable job, my home of nine years in Seattle, and it’s still scary trying to make decisions about where I want to go or what I want to do next! But just like my cousin kept plugging away at university, I keep going because traveling is what I have come to love. The unwelcome, but the necessary reminder from this week is that life is short and now is the time to love those around you and live the life you’re scared of living. Send that message to a friend who you lost contact with, call up that family member you were thinking about, apply for that new position you’re more passionate about, pick up and move to a new place, sign up for that marathon or gym membership, make that difficult decision to change something small, but DO SOMETHING. Do something today that scares you. Because after a year of stepping into my fears time and time again, that’s how I’ve made it this far and that’s how I’ll keep going. |