See the World

You know those "Home Sweet Home" signs that people have around:













Well I don't. I mean, if I did, I would need like...a gazillion. Home is not a stationary place -- home is everywhere, home is the world. Home is London, Paris, Venice, Florence, Nice, California, New York, and all the places I've never been. When you stand in front of a map, a globe, the world looks so small. Yeah, okay, so from that perspective, the world has been shrinking for quite sometime now as explorers began to fill in the edges of the map. In books, you can go from India to Brazil by just flipping two pages -- it's people who see the world as small who stay at home and read about it. Truth is, once you put yourself out there, the world's a really big place and no globe or map does it justice.

The distance from Naples, Italy to Croatia is a bazillion times more than an inch and a half. It's miles and miles of lush green Italy before reaching the towering alps and long drive east through Austria and Slovenia. No photo of any monument will impress you after you've seen the real thing. The first time I saw la tour Eiffel, I was in shock and awe that they built it just for the world fair when today it stands as a symbol of Paris.










When you stand where the people who shaped history stood; on the leaning tower of Pisa, Great Wall of China, Beijing Road, you feel the sense of time just kind of disappear. There isn't a single book written that can capture the cultures of the world perfectly either. When you go somewhere in the world, and you see the people there, living their lives the way they always have, and maybe it's totally new to you. You're not looking at their faces in photos, you're talking to them, hearing their voices, apologizing to them for bumping into them. As an acceptance of your apology, they may nod, curtsy, bow, or kick you in the shins, who knows. When yo interact with people you kind of realize that there are 6.8 billion people on the planet, scattered, all over the place. How do you know which people not to apologize to anymore because you'll receive a kick in the shins? You don't, and that's the beauty of it.

6.8 People live on this planet today. So somewhere in the world, someone is brushing their teeth, washing the dishes, hitting the snooze button on the alarm, going swimming, eating a birthday cake, posting a blog post. It's not hard to see the magnitude of that. You try sticking 6.8 billion pushpins into a world map! This is a big world, you're not alone there are 6,799,999,999 other people out there; a zillion other languages plus dialects, a bazillion slang words. At sometime or another, you'll be certain that the world is really small (perhaps this was influenced by certain 'Disneyland' ride that tries to compact the world into a minuscule collection of dancing dolls and 5 minutes of boat ride, hm?) It's just that you don't want to be stuck in that rut forever. Books will have to suffice sometimes, but don't let it be your only knowledge of the world.

The world can't fit in the palm of your hand or 5-minutes of cheesy music.










There are countless places I want to go, countless things I want to do, and truthfully, I'll never really see the whole world. When they say you have the whole world (the real world) in front you, please, don't imagine yourself standing in front of a large world map. Take it as the sign to go see it. You're a citizen of the planet Earth -- take advantage of that.