“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”

The text above is a quote from one of my favorite books, Everything Is Illuminated.  So, the question at hand here is, what makes you want to breathe, what sounds make you want to dance, and what is it that you are living for? For me, feeling alive is appreciating the beauty in everything, like seeing the world through the eyes of a curious child. Children absorb every detail of what is around them. Everything is fresh, and exhilarating, and worth questioning. They haven’t yet been tainted by hatred, and they can still see the world with wide eyes and an open heart. I want to find the space for every color, every language, every culture, and appreciate the movement in every object.  

When I get butterflies in my stomach, this is associated with feeling like a child again; why can’t that feeling also be an adult feeling? Shouldn’t it be? Pushing myself into something new creates that feeling and that is something I don’t experience enough. What I need is to feel uncomfortable. I need to feel the discomfort in being too comfortable. I get too restless. Everything becomes predictable, monotonous. The easiest way I have found to continue to live life feeling everything is through travel. I have to keep moving. I love the sense of living out of a suitcase; of having everything that is mine in the world tucked into one bag.

Give me something more. Throw me into a society where I know and understand almost nothing. Give me a metro map to a city with stops that I can’t pronounce any of the names of. Force me to order a coffee in a language I struggle profoundly with. Form relationships with people who don’t speak English. Learn to communicate in ways more meaningful than words. I feel brave when I do these things. I need to feel brave again to feel alive again.

I need visible progress. This is why I love studying language so much. Maybe at first, the only distinguishable thing is where a word stops and another starts, but soon it becomes clear if something was a question, or if it was out of anger, and finally an entire statement becomes somewhat decipherable. Finding these patterns in language are beautiful, small victories. Like navigating from the city center back home. Maybe for the first trips, the map is required, just for reassurance. Shortly, it is so familiar as if it has obviously always been the way. But after time, these routines too become too comfortable, and I feel the need to find something new again. Onward. There is such beauty in the small doses. The temporary. The storm.

I have held onto empty bottles of European products for the mere sake of having something tangible.  Now I read the fine Swedish print on the bottle. I read this for six months. This combination of characters that I didn’t even take notice of anymore after some time, which I now cling to as if it is a vital organ. Traveling, discovery, and exploration constantly show me what is meaningful.  Everything good in this world is something that isn’t tangible. That is what makes it so difficult to feel, to see, to understand. So hard to love, to appreciate, and to scream about anything of importance.  These important things cannot be contained in glass jars, neither pressed into an overflowing suitcase, neither plastered to a wall, and neither preserved in paint, nor written in a journal. They have to be felt, seen, understood, loved, appreciated, and screamed about in the moment they occur.  Because now those moments are over.  The smells of smiles so faded, dumb photographs covering my walls, drunken signatures sprinkled across a world map, the forgotten voices and dispositions of people I love.  
While visiting a beach in A Coruña, I remembered how much I love the ocean. It absolutely astonishes me. The vastness, the blueness. The sky and water becoming one ethereal entity before me. Thinking, “How could anyone ever get used to this?” But we do get used to it. (My friends could not understand why the ocean made me cry.) Just as I am used to looking out from a window in Missouri and seeing every building, every house, every tree. The flatness of the land displaying everything before me. Just as I am used to the boundless blue sky--the biggest sky I have ever seen--and just as I am used to seeing each star in the night. But the ocean, how could anyone ever find this ordinary? I want to live life never becoming accustomed to anywhere, anything, or anyone. I never want to overlook the beauty of a relationship or a city or a landscape or a sound or a shape. 

Now that I am back in the United States, I find myself distracted by all the English surrounding me.  I no longer have moments of excitement when I hear my own language being spoken in public.  Instead, I hear things that I don’t mind to hear, intimate details of lives that I would rather go on not knowing. I even begin to stop listening all together and instead I hear the rhythm and the sounds and the patterns that language forms. But I hate that. I want to constantly be fully engaged – like when having to focus so hard to understand something from the Spanish conversation happening at the dinner table.  I am no longer excited about my own language, because it is no surprise to hear English.  I love being surrounded by unintelligible words that I can only appreciate the sounds of.  Falling into a silent world where everyone understands me, but I cannot understand them.  In these moments I also feel brave.

So for now, I try to find the beauty in small details. Good friends and good coffee, getting lost and getting found, travel and exploration through a camera lens, learning and exposure through language, and genuine connections with people. I never want to get used to this life. I want to see myself growing and progressing and learning every day. I want everything to move me and I want to feel so much. I want to live raw emotion. I want to discover myself through discovering the world.  I want the perceptions of my own life to change as my perceptions of the world change. I want to feel alive because the world feels alive.