I stumbled upon a personal growth article this weekend, and that’s odd because I tend to stay clear from such things. Yet I found it quite relevant, so much that I thought I would share it (the delivery is also amusing, which is something new for this kind of content).
It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do. You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites. But at various moments of your routine, you pause and take a good look at your surroundings. The scenes of your everyday life. The blur of this all-too-familiar film. And you can’t help but to wonder… If there is more to it all. For some reason — this country, this city, this neighborhood, this particular street — is the place you are living a majority of your life in. And it is this thought that allows a daydream to seep in. You start thinking of all the other places you could be in this world. Or more accurately, all the places you’d rather be in. Somewhere more exciting. Somewhere new. Somewhere that can provide experiences that are foreign to you.
While I agree with the article, I’d also mention that travel or putting some distance from the Box of Daily Experience, as the author calls it, is a great way to appreciate what we leave behind; to re-evaluate it from a different perspective.
As I read the article, I kept thinking, this is not particularly original; I read something like this before. Then, by the end of the piece, a note tells us that the text is, in fact, an adaptation of Seneca’s letter to Lucilius on the subject of travel. Seneca’s moral letters to Lucilius are just pure awesomeness.