Much of life seems to be made up of a series of mundane occurrences that happen day after day – alarm sounds, press snooze, get up, brush teeth, dress, and on and on it goes.
But sometimes there are days, nestled between the monotony, that break the routine. You are thrust out of your comfort zone, caused to step out on faith while consumed by feelings of exhilaration and nervousness.
And in a few weeks, I will experience a welcome disruption in my routine that will catapult me into a new adventure.
With my small red suitcase in one hand and my passport in the other, and my perfectly worn beige Birkenstocks adorning my feet, I will board a plane and travel across a great, blue ocean to London, England.
I will live in a flat, roam outdoor marketplaces, stop for a spot of afternoon tea, travel the countryside, experience the theatre, the culture, the food, and stand in awe of the architecture.
However, travel can be much more than just seeing the sights. Whether it’s a person you meet, an art gallery you visit or a mountain you climb, historian and activist Mary Ritter Beard once said that to travel is surrendering to a deep and permanent change that happens in our living.
The travels of my 20s have given me the opportunity to appreciate aspects about who I am I’ve questioned, valued and wanted to explore in deeper ways.
A few years ago I found myself in the small city of Morogoro, Tanzania, beneath a bright, blue sky, teaching English to young female students. This work brought me to a continent whose essence, history, scares and beauty surge through my veins. Although I had never stepped foot on Tanzanian soil before then, resting against a baobab tree with a few of my students, I felt at home. Those age-old questions of “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?” began to find answers among the kind and generous people of Morogoro – on the continent of Africa – the place of my heritage.
Two years later, I was standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias, Israel, watching the sun rise, draping the water in gold. This was a place I had read about for many years – the area where Jesus had gathered his disciples, performed miracles, calmed the wind and waves and walked on water. If Africa was where I was enriched by my heritage, Israel is where I became enriched by my faith and its history. Among the arid landscape and olive groves, I felt another piece to the puzzle had been completed.
Traveling to London will put the third puzzle piece in place. This series of travels has helped me connect with my heritage, my faith, and now my deep interest in literature and the written word.
England is the home of so many amazing writers – from Keats, to Virginia Woolf, to the Bronte sisters, T.S. Eliot, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and the imaginative C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.
I have enjoyed many works by these authors and more. I have been prideful and prejudiced with Jane Austen; learned some important lessons through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; discovered that “love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds” through Shakespeare’s sonnets; have come of age with Will Lightman in Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy;” and have followed the complicated love affair between Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew in David Nicholls’ “One Day.”
I hope this trip gives me time to appreciate the country that has inspired so many great stories. Perhaps, I will spend a day or two or three at a cafe, people watching, writing my observations in my journal, being inspired as the greats were and enjoying a city and a country, that writer Samuel Johnson once said that by seeing shows you as much of life as the world could show.
Jarreau Freeman is education writer for The Reporter and Montgomery Media. Follow her on Twitter @JarreauFreeman
