The Volcano Next Door

My sister Nicole called from Las Vegas this evening. She moved to Colorado a dozen years ago, married an Air Force Academy cadet, then left for assignments in England, Hawaii, Alabama, D.C. and El Salvador before moving back within driving distance.

We chatted briefly about riding motorcycles at the family reunion this year and she told me a story about learning to ride on the volcano next to their place in El Salvador. She seemed to barely notice the fact that she was riding on a VOLCANO - and THAT is the point of this entire blog: one person's ordinary is everyone else's exotic. Is there any escape from our ordinary hum drum existence when the exotic becomes ordinary the moment we get used to it?

I quit my job late this spring and bought a one-way ticket to Aruba. My friend picked me up in the sailboat he just bought in Venezuela and we left for the Panama Canal. While waiting for our passage date, we spent a week in the San Blas islands, fishing, swimming around coral reefs, and teaching children living on a 50-yard-wide island how to play hop scotch using a course scratched into the white sand and a piece of coral as the hoppy tah.

Ordinary or exotic? It depends on who you ask.

After five weeks, having left the islands and spent days on end with nothing but the endless blue ocean for a horizon, nowhere to go beyond the 53' confines of the boat, I found my cell phone one day and it transported me to a reality I had begun to forget. I no longer took for granted the ability to step out the front door and go for an evening walk, hop in the car and drive down to the supermarket, or call a friend and go to a movie. The romantic dream of sailing thousands of miles across the oceans was becoming a stifling, restless nightmare.

As a rule, man's a fool
When it's hot, he wants it cool.
When it's cool, he wants it hot,
Always wanting what is not.
- Nat King Cole

The solution? Unacceptable answers include accepting a hum drum life with nothing beautiful or interesting or refreshing enough to make you care that you're still alive. You must either discover the extraordinary in the commonplace or make a habit of trying something new.

Easier said than done - life's routines have a way of taking up all your time and energy and making you forget all else. The exotic all around you becomes ordinary and you forget to notice its appeal. Days and weeks and years pass by and when old friends ask "What's new?" you only shrug and answer "Same old same old."

Easier said than done, but I will try.