Here's to the Courageous Explorers of the World!

I was reading an article posted on a friend's blog (http://adamtina.com/2008/04/18/varanasi/ - you must read this full article... she has a great command of descriptive language! ) about a trip to Varanasi, India and it struck me how incredibly different we all are!!! In our U.S. suburban lives of our Baby Boomer Generation, we were born into our environment much the same as anyone else in this world and it becomes part of us. We are comfortable in what we have known most of our lives. It has always surprised me how much even driving a few miles to another area close to my home town shows culture changes. Neighborhoods in our country have their own cultures and we usually feel out of place, at least least until we are there for a few days. As we drive through these "other places" (even though only miles from our homes) we begin to feel that comfort and stress leaving us as we near our own homes... ah.... yes... "there's no place like home"!

I have even been amazed by friends who have permanently moved out of our local area of where they were born... "how can they do that?", I would think to myself! I lived most of my life in the town I where I was born, until I underwent a life changing event of divorce. I still don't know how I did it to this day! Some things were going on in my life that made me different, as if I was being guided by some outside force. I often though it was the spirit of my father who had passed away just the year before I began this change. Never the less, I did courageous things! It can be done. I met my soul mate and now wife and best friend of 15 years and we made a few physical moves and ended up really less than 20 miles from my city of birth, but at first it was strange...it wasn't home to either of us. You find that you can change and adapt, well at least as long as it's still middle income suburbia, U.S. :-) (I'm not that fearless)

We Boomers in our country have a culture and bountiful blessings beyond the imaginations of millions of people around the world and that is an understatement to be sure! I can not image what it must be like for someone from a resource poor nation to come here and be placed in any of our local shopping malls. They would surely feel as if they had died and gone to heaven for the site of "stuff" we take for granted that is within our grasp.

So I take my hat off to the daring explorers of the world... from the friends who moved to a new job across the U.S. to the two who struck out to Varanasi, India and all the "indiana Jone's" of the world. Without you, we would know nothing, but I really prefer watching you on websites and television instead, from my comfy reclining chair in front of my wide screen television... :-)