Travel inspires lifelong storytelling

I love good stories.

I love to tell them. I love to hear them. And I especially love to chase them. To me, a story is made to be a good one by the little details. The unique decorations to a tale that make it stand out. I wouldn’t dare tell you about the time I spent a March weekend in Donegal and expect you to be impressed. But what if I told you I spent a March weekend in Donegal in an RV belonging to a family of six and ended up eating a full course meal in a hotel ballroom all because in January I went to a free concert to watch a German bluegrass band known as The Yonder Boys. Now, that’s a bit more interesting.

I couldn’t fabricate the full details making up the entirety of that story even if I tried! That’s what makes it a good one. It is something that could have only happened to me in the exact way it did. Nobody else will ever have that same story. I could care less about how you studied abroad in France and went and saw the Eiffel Tower. Anyone could have done that. But if you studied abroad in France, saw the Eiffel Tower, and while you were there, you got challenged to a dance battle by a street performer and, although you didn’t win, they gave you their hat and a bottle of wine. Well, you would have me thinking about that all day.

You would have me thinking about it because you didn’t shy away when life put an unfamiliar pen and paper in front of you. You embraced the opportunity for a good story to be written. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to study abroad in the first place. I wanted to go somewhere new and return home with a new collection of anecdotes I could regale people with around a bonfire, in a bar, at the dinner table or up on a stage.

I wanted to come back to the life I am used to with enough new stories in my back pocket to remind myself and others that there is so much more to life than what is right around you. Now, I could be biased, but I do think this is a good philosophy to have towards living life. To quote Jack Kerouac, “You won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”

In many respects, Mr. Kerouac wasn’t the best person to model your life off of, but he was on to something when he wrote that. To get good a story, sometimes you have to climb the mountain, even if it is intimidating. I don’t know about you, but when my bones are turning to dust, I’d rather use my last breaths to describe the years I spent shouting from peaks rather than ones just dreaming about it from some desk.