The Adventure of Living

“Travel is rebellion in its purest form. We follow our heart. We free ourselves of labels. We lose control willingly. We trade a role for reality. We love the unfamiliar. We trust strangers. We own only what we can carry. We search for better questions, not answers. We truly graduate. We, sometimes choose, never to come back.”

I came to Japan to completely step out of life as I knew it.   It was a mindful decision to take myself out of what had become mindless habits and routines and a mindset I had been culturally conditioned into and step into a completely different world to experience a new way of looking at things.

The other day as I was sitting alone in a small cafe, a Japanese version of an Italian restaurant, I couldn’t help but notice as “Daydream Believer”, an American song from the 60’s played in the background, amidst the giggles of Japanese girls and the dinner conversation of a handful of Japanese families.  I realized in that moment I had done just that.  It was as if I were a being from another planet who landed here, in a world completely foreign and full of paradoxes to me.

I am an explorer and adventurer by nature, so it is a challenge that excites me.  I am up for exploring this new world.  Yet, I am reminded each and every day that it is a confusing world to learn and navigate, whether it is in finding my way through the market with all food labels in kanji characters I do not understand, or getting off my bus three miles too early because I am confused by the street names, or learning by error that every day they switch the men’s and women’s sides of the onsen (bath house).

All of these experiences are normal daily experiences in this new world.  It keeps me awake and alive every single day.  Each new day is an adventure.  I have come here to learn and laugh at the fact that most every day I will set out in one direction and end up somewhere completely different, meeting someone I would not have met, discovering some new place I would have never otherwise found.  

It can be taxing, but the rewards are so much greater.

Isn’t this the real adventure of life?  Isn’t this truly living?