“All of life is a foreign country.”
― Jack Kerouac
What is the first thing you do when you enter a country for the first time? I find that
whenever I travel to someplace new, I first acclimate myself. I look around and see what is different from what I have experienced before and what is similar. I love experiencing things for the first time and delight in people watching. What can I learn here and now that I have never known? How can I expand my knowledge? Each place ends up marking me in a new way.
When is the last time you looked around at your present environment as if it were a new country to explore? How much do we take for granted in our everyday lives that could if looked at with no expectations, reveal new things about life and the world around us? Life is never static and much happens around us every day. As Dan Millman’s teacher Socrates says in “Way of the Peaceful Warrior”, “There is never ‘nothing going on’.”
I would like to challenge everyone reading this to wake up tomorrow and experience something familiar as if you are seeing it for the first time.
Blessings, G
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
OK. We’ve left our comfort zone. What do we do now? Well, to start off with, look around. What does what we’re doing look like? We’ve never done it before, never been to this place so we have no map. Let’s make one as we go along so that we can either find our way back or to describe to others what we see. It’s amazing how much more real something becomes when we describe it to others.
Since what we are mapping is a new experience, a new headspace and we experience these things through our senses that is what our map is made from. What am I looking at? What sound am I hearing? What am I feeling? What thoughts does it engender in me? Making maps, experiencing new things is fun. If it doesn’t feel like fun it is usually because you are too busy trying to locate yourself on an old map and forgetting the wonder you had as a child when you were experiencing something for the first time.
On His Mind by G A Rosenberg 
