The Mirror

When you are young and adventurous there is always a yearning to leave the safety of your comfortable environment and seek out the challenge of the unknown, a brand new adventure. As many cultures embrace this adventure time, in fact we have an institution that promotes "going away". Just as the aborigines have the walkabout, where a young man leaves his tribe as a rite of passage into adulthood and the Amish have rumspringa, a period where a young man or woman leaves the sect to decide whether the amish ways are right for him or her on an individual basis; Americans use college to this same endeavor. Other primates also employ this type of behavior as a method to maintain gene flow. Baboon males will leave one troop to join another so as to limit incest.

I have never studied abroad and experienced another culture and country intimately, and in the back of my mind I would like to move for a year or so to another place far away to experience how the canooks, kiwis or aussies live and work. It would be a completely educational experience with little or no time devoted to fun and games, but in the end I would be the better for it. It would give me time to make reasonable decisions about what I want to do with the rest of my life and at the same time, extinguish the unsettled travel pilot flame. When it was done I could head back into Americareer with a better feeling in my stomach for settling down with a better grasp on what I want to do with the rest of my life. When I told my dad of my plan he answered, "You still have to look in the mirror every morning."

Is it that I want to get out of the dump I have made for myself here, jump from my grave I have been digging for myself or could it be that I want to gain new experiences without trying to remove myself from this one. Can we yearn to experience new places while not trying to escape the current ones? After all why would you want to leave if all was well? As I attempt to come to terms with these opposing rationales, I see more often than not that both are mutually exclusive; accepting one with truth convicts the other's reasonable plausibility.