The decisions we make…

The decisions we make are not necessarily the ones we would make again.  If I’d done things differently in the beginning, would my life be different now?  If I’d made the choice to stay home, to not move, to not study, to work somewhere else, to be a marine biologist – would my life be different now?

Most days I convince myself that my life is my choice.  That I purposefully made the decisions that I had because that was what I wanted, what I needed, what was best for me.  There are days though, like today, that make me wonder if I truly have made the right decisions.

I am no spring chicken anymore.  Not old by anyone’s standards (unless you are 15) but still – not old.  Plenty of life left to live and plenty more choices left to make.  But it’s days like today that I wonder whether or not I’ve made the right ones.  From the moment I opened the encyclopaedia in Year six to do a project on Portugal, I knew it wasn’t enough for me just to read about it.  Before the days of Google Maps, all I could do was poor over the glossy pages of the World Book Encyclopaedia staring at that red and yellow flag and blue and yellow map with the red lines knowing that there was so much more to Portugal than I could get from those shiny white pages. I couldn’t smell it, see it, be part of something on paper.  I had to be there.

Apparently most of my life I’ve felt the need to be in the middle of things. Even as a teenager I wanted to know what was better, what was round the corner, where I should’ve been rather than where I was.  I lived, like everybody else, with the fear of disappointment that I had missed something that everybody else was in on.  At the age of twenty I took my first OS trip and like most young Aussie’s, the lure of a cheap trip was more important than the destination.  Bali it was.  A graduation present for my best friend and I.  A week and a bit in a tropical paradise that was a world far removed from our own.

Since then I seemed to have spent my life searching for the rest of the world.  Always restless, still that fifteen year old teenager who thinks that the world is better somewhere else. I thought today, for the first time out loud, that my singledom may be a part consequence of my restlessness.  I’ve never been brave enough to face the world for a sustained period of time all on my own.  Never left for a year or more, never really lived a life more than the one I’d made right here.  But every twelve months or so my temper shortens, I am restless, irritable and I am on the search again.

I want to see it all.  Feel it all. Smell it all.  But I want to do it all somewhere else.  I hope that by leaving, if only for a short time that I’ll find whatever it is I’m looking for.  I know the grown ups say you can never be happy till you accept what you have and love it.  But I can’t seem to shake that restless teenager who wants it all.  So I plan the trips, short and long, spend my life saving for one trip and planning another.  The search is in me, not made, not controlled, just in various stages of dormancy and ravaging plague – the only cure to immerse myself in something I’ve never seen before.

Travelling is not a choice anymore.  It’s a constant search to find that part of the world you love the most. But today I realised there isn’t one. There isn’t one place in the world that’s better than the other – what’s different is me.  It is me that changes when I leave the country, I am a better person for having seen more and be affected by those I’ve never met. I am more me there than I am in any place here. There is something about leaving the country that allows me to be me. I forget all of the shoulds that roll in my head and instead I focus on the want tos.  I want to eat, I want to see, I want to feel, I want to meet, I want to dance, smell, hear, be part of a world so much larger than myself.  And while that place can exist right here at home, I just haven’t found it yet.   

The decisions that I’ve made may not have helped me to the final end goal of sorting it all out and having a baby or two, and it’s not a choice for everyone, but I can’t ignore the shiny white pages of World Book encyclopaedia that I touched at the age of eleven.  I will learn to love the life I have, I will accept the choices I have made but until I learn those things, I will buy another plane ticket.