I WANT TO GO TO THERE.

Tip #34 - go somewhere outside your normal - explore and observe

This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to the end of 2024 or whenever it ends, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.

TIP #34 - Go somewhere outside your normal - explore and observe

Often my go to fall back excuse for not taking action is “well I just do not KNOW ___ (fill in the blank) about anything”.

Often when I’m getting to know people, I’ll learn so much new stuff that I end up saying “omg I didn’t know about this, I’ve never heard/tried/seen/considered that before…I didn’t know this existed!” a lot/too much.

And duh. That’s part of life, learning what all is in here.

What places and things and people are on the planet with us.

It takes time and nobody has seen everything, or knows everything that exists, or has tried all the combinations of everything that’s around anyway.

As sheltered and late to learn a lot of things as I feel that I am, It can be a helpful reminder to shut my mouth about how MUCH I feel I don’t know and haven’t seen, and just enjoy getting to be seeing it now.

The other part and essential part of this, the verb part of this, is to take my life discovery into my own hands more often and with more intention.

Instead of letting someone else suggest a trip, suggest a thing to do, bring me with them, go on an event with the kids sports, etc, I can also take myself to things I haven’t done before.

Sometimes we all forget that.

To go outside the normal means theres more to consider, there’s more to interact with, there’s more to have ideas about, to gain and develop opinions about.

There’s more people to talk to and encounter, and there’s more life to your life.

**There’s a lot of layers to this that I’m going to skip over a little bit, but I hope to emphasize that this can be done to whatever degree your’e able to - in both large and small ways.**

Exploring beyond your normal can be taking a different walk path on your long walk days. It can mean trying a different type of food in a different part of town. It can mean watching a different type of show, looking up a different genre of book, exploring a different park at a different time of day and seeing what all is going on.

You don’t have to be traveling to other country’s in order to expand your normal and gain valuable insights.

Just as most things, the intention you bring and the awareness you have present with you is what matters most in your learning, growth, and healing development.

If you can or have the means or the desire to do some traveling, I highly recommend it. I want to, and have goals to travel to lots of places while I’m still here, but there’s details to work out before that stuff happens.

Anyway. On that note, I have been able to travel out of the states twice.

Once when I was in high school I accompanied my mom and step dad on a garden tour of the Netherlands.

It was relatively close after they got married and I wasn’t very happy at all. I spent a lot of that trip writing in my journal as a way to force my attention outside of myself. I filled a very large notebook with things I saw, pieces of wrappers of things I ate, and drawings or whatever, and train of thought word barf that I think I was trying to use to figure out how I felt, how I was going to get through and figure out who, if anyone, I was then.

To have a personal crisis even in the Netherlands, is to still have a crises.

Wherever you go there you are, after all.

But to know that other realities exist that are so vastly different than your own - these museums and canals, outdoor cafe’s full of interesting people who were oblivious to my teenage problems - is to know that in that many possibilities there is also a possibility, a likelihood even, that you can make it through to the future you’re wanting, and/or at least into a better place than you’re in now.

Proof of the possible is such a gift and a blessing, and a joy bringing thing to me.

The second time I left the states was immediately after getting married in 2007. We spend a few months in Bolivia one summer of college for credit and adventure reasons.

I didn’t speak Spanish but managed to get some school credit. We were there to work with small businesses and do some charity work type stuff. It was a learning experience for so many reasons and also a massive period of change and struggle for me.

Along with the massive widening of my eyes, it was also very tough. I was 19. Didn’t speak the language well so the only person I could talk to with this dude I’d married and who I was also figuring out how to be the supportive Mormon wife to.

I was 19. I was 19. I was 19. wtf I was 19.

During that summer a girl I had known since preschool passed away suddenly and tragically and it was devastating.

I had never experienced such extremes in terms of poverty before.

I struggled with understanding how the same God I was raised to believe in who was supposed to love everyone would allow this to happen to people, and on the other end how people would let things like this happen to them too.

Surely if one was earnest enough, well intentioned enough, prayed hard enough, hard working enough, they could also be blessed to figure it out? Why were they given these endless trials of the soul to endure that were so much more intense and difficult and relentless?

I didn’t understand the layers and layers and layers that caused these situations.

It was my first experience living with a dude too and the expectations for a young mormon wife are intense. It was just a whole hell of a lot. I didn’t handle it all super well, but I learned, I explored the area, I found joy in the food, the culture, the people.

I washed our laundry by hand and read a lot of Sophia Kinsella books. I flipped the slides when we taught classes on budgeting for small businesses. I made friends with the local kids and the dogs that ran around, and ended up being able to have a full but halting conversation with some local folks the week before we left to go back to Virginia.

Anyway.

Exploration and wider eyes.

However far you go from your home bed, exploring your world is so helpful.

There’s a quote or an idea, idk which, but it says something like it’s not possible for us to find in this lifetime all the things, all the people, all the foods, hobbies, etc that we can love and be loved by. Because there’s so much here and there’s so many people here.

I find some comfort in that for exciting reasons and for self love reasons.

Often, we think or tend to have maybe been trained to think that the solution to whatever our issues are is to shrink.

To take up less space, just be quieter, more neat, to go on a diet, to save all our money, to stay home and stay small…but really, almost always the solution that will heal us, that will grow us and help guide us and help us find more is one of expansiveness.

To expand our awareness helps us find who we are.

To expand our attention helps us love other people better.

To expand our resources helps our resources expand and helps us value ourselves and our time better.

To expand our experiences helps us find more that we wanna experience, and that leads to more connections, more relationships, more possibilities, more things to like, to learn from, to be enriched by, and to contribute value towards.

Expansion is so often what we need most.

Putting on the idea to explore and observe is a crucial shift – in my experience anyway.

Coming from a history that was very much rigidly scheduled and with a large sense of appearance and control, that doesn’t leave much space to explore, to “see what happens” as seeing what happens is against the puritanical beliefs of productivity over all that so many of us were trained in.

Exploring leaves room and space to hear from what our heart responds to.

It leaves room for us to follow what feels right, to even be on the lookout for listening to the feedback we get by being out in the world and observing things.

If we’re on a preplanned predestined precontrolled experience (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s real nice when someone else makes the plans and you can just show up and go that’s a valuable skill but also not quite what I mean here), how can we find or hear of have time to feel it?

Exploring and observing involves an interior conversation that is a helpful skill to develop.

And another thing.

I think what else I mean by go someplace outside your normal and explore and observe is also to experience other perspectives in the world.

Duh. And also.

What I mean is, to put yours away for a minute and be around something different. Different emotionally. Different in mentality. Different in beliefs, structure, etc.

The intangible different things to experience are also essential to observe and consider.

My brother has downsyndrome and I’ve spent a lot of time, as a kid mostly but still as an adult, around his summer camps, the Special Olympics activities, the group home holiday times, the special ed class in high school he was part of.

Being in those places you see a whole other part of the world. A whole new set of people, of skillsets, a new way of expressing and experiencing joy, a new definition of love, endurance, support, patience, and tender firmness and care.

I used to volunteer at a horse therapy barn. Not therapy for horses, but in which amazing chill af horses were there to help facilitate therapy for folks of all ages with various needs.

Most often when I was there the patients were children or youths, and we would walk along side of the horse with the therapist facilitator in front.

The motion of the horse does something to the human body that can’t be achieved other ways. The meditative state when you’re maintaining a slow rhythm, a moving safety net of safety nets, for one person in the middle, the highest from the ground, the one in the most need, who sits atop a massive creature, walking slowly making constant surety of their care, it’s impossible not to reconsider your entire perspective along with each stomp of the horse in the soft dirt.

Seeing the families drive the riders there, then packing all up at the end to leave until next time. Knowing you’re helping experience an unlocking of things that hasn’t been possible for them until now, that your tiny part is a crucial tiny part, and your life is a tiny but crucial part of everything else we’re here for too.

A little woo. But good woo.

That is also what I mean when it’s important to go outside of your normal and explore and observe.

The lessons from this one are intended and necessary to be two fold – to gain an idea of what else exists in two ways, to understand what’s possible and appreciate what you have.

It’s not using the experiences of others to feel better about yourself, but to check yourself and your life.

How else do we learn. In order to experience, we have to go have some experiences.

Being out of your normal reminds you - you’re not the only person with problems, you’re not the only person who’s overcome, who is still overcoming, who is still becoming something more, who is still discovering, still growing, still figuring out how to be a human and of use and of value and a part of the world.

Getting a breath of the world outside of the one you know in emotion, in location, in daily experience, it is an essential part of the growth, healing, discovery, and improvement process.

Eyes open, chin up, paying attention - ilysm - Marian