The Good Fight

Okay so, remember my resolution to read 1-2 books each month? Well let's mark January and February as a complete fail. There really is no excuse, I just didn't make time for it.

I started the year off with The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho; a genuinely remarkable read. I just finished it on March 1st. Even though it took me 2 months to read 260 pages (pathetic, I know), I thoroughly enjoyed it whenever I managed to pick it up. Paulo Coelho is an incredibly wise man. I have "ruined" (says Brian) the book with my scribbles in the margins and my underlining of passages I deem thought provoking. Which is...a good chunk of each page.

Throughout the book, an underlying message of the "good fight" appeared again and again:

"The good fight is the one that's fought in the name of our dreams. When we're young and our dreams first explode inside us, we are very courageous, but we haven't yet learned how to fight. With great effort, we learn how to fight but by then we no longer have the courage to go to combat. We become our own worst enemy. We say that our dreams are childish, or too difficult to realize,or the result of our not having known enough about life.We kill our dreams because we're afraid to fight the good fight."

And I sat there and pondered...what's my "good fight?" What am I supposed to be "fighting" for?

For those of you that know me well, you know that my great love is for travel. Like...obsessed! I saw most of the United States in high school, but I sprouted an interest in other cultures, religions and languages in college. I actually graduated with my Associates degree in Humanities. (Most of you are like, whaaa?) And almost everyone asked me, "what are you going to do with that?" When I said "something to do with travel, like a travel agent or cultural anthropologist." Then they told me it was a waste, and not practical. But, it's still what I want to do every day. Even if all I do is plan fabulous vacations for others and never go myself. It makes me happy.

"When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth....Adapting oneself to new situations and receiving in return all of the thousands of blessings that life generously offers to those who seek them."---Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

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On another note, Brian and I took a field trip to Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago; Brian had a gift card left over from Christmas that he had been dying to redeem. (He found 3 great books he's really excited about -  he read the first 50 pages of one in the store before he bought it. Thanks Gene and Deb!) He even let me use his remaining $1.32 toward my purchase. What a gentleman. Ladies, I'm keepin this one. No, but really, he's great.

While he was nerding out in the Sci-Fi section, I had my own geek-fest in the Travel Essays. I spent over an hour navigating a whole shelf and a half; I stood there like a star-struck teenager. I had butterflies furiously flapping in my stomach. I stood there flipping through, reading, day dreaming, reminiscing about my own travel disasters. That's when I realized...this is my dream. At least once, I want to be one of these crazy nomads that drops everything and spends their savings on an unbelievable year long trip to everywhere, for no other reason than to see what happens. I'm way too impatient to save it for my mid-life crisis. Anyway I left the bookstore with a discounted Ken Follett novel, Walden, and about 45 pictures of books that went straight onto my wish list on Amazon.com. Of that entire shelf of Travel Essays, probably 3 of them didn't make it on that list.

What can I say? It's my passion. For a while now I've toyed around with the idea of taking an online course in Travel Writing. (Yes, there is such a wonderful thing.) And now, I'm seriously thinking I'll give it a shot. Gotta go for it... gotta fight the good fight.