Some people are mesmerized by the twinkling of stars up in the sky, some people choose to submerge themselves into the aqueous depths of the oceans and others still can’t wait to reveal the secrets of the molten core of our ancient planet. Personally, I’ve always taken a much shallower approach and looked at the Earth as only skin deep. Yet, for such a limited view, there is so much to explore, uncover and know. If the Earth was a person, well, let’s just say it would be a race of its own, a multicolored, infinitely lingual and indefinably ethnic being. Let’s be honest: she’d be the life of the party. She’d tell all the best stories, know all the funniest jokes, and, well, be absolutely perfect. To put it simply, I’ve fallen head over heels for the apple of my eye. Our one and only Earth.
Extra, extra, read all about it! Front page news, folks! Just a ha’penny for the story of the decade! “Young east coast college student proposes to good ol’ Earth. Due to incapability to respond, she accepts! Date of wedding unknown.”
Some people may call her mother, but I can’t help but love her. If that means I’ve got an Oedipus complex, then call up Dr. Frankenstein and wake up Freud. Looks like he was actually right about something. There’s a world of possibilities right here on the surface and I’ve waited with fiery-red-ants-in-my-pants anticipation to go and uncover them all. I’m ready to traverse the open seas, snowboard with the yetis on the Himalayas and meet people I couldn’t have even imagined existed. I feel like a better (more attractive and obviously cooler) version of Christopher Columbus, only there aren’t any continents left to discover. Granted, he didn’t think there were either.
I’ve wanted to travel the world and explore new places since before even the womb but now that I’m preparing to go off by myself, the world I’ve cultivated right here in Boston and even back home in the simple old Midwest, suddenly seem a tad bit bigger and strangely undiscovered.
Despite all the wonderful experiences my travels are sure to bring, externalities and side effects I cannot even begin to fathom, I can’t help but wonder what I’ll be missing back here at home. Besides the cold winter, I’m leaving behind friends, teachers and places that will only be in my life for a short amount of time. Four years. That’s it. That’s all we get. Then we’re loaded into a syringe and literally jettisoned into the “real world” where we’ll spend the rest of our lives fighting off the “flu,” like any good vaccine. I can’t help but wonder whether studying abroad is really all that it’s hyped up to be.
I got a fortune cookie the other day that reminded me, “Worrying over what you don’t have, only wastes the things you do have.” While the wisdom of Panda Express blows my mind on a weekly basis, this knowledge failed to capture the notion of my conscious choice to give up what I have in order to plunge into the deep unknowns of the world.
As Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist who we’re all apparently supposed to know like some old school chum, once wrote, we are all “condemned to be free.” That freedom, that choice, is perhaps the greatest obstacle of our human condition.
At this point, I’m studying abroad as a means of escaping Blinky the ghost who’s decided to haunt me. Don’t fooled by his name, folks, I’m not dealing with any grim grinning Casper here trying to socialize. But in all actuality, by the time I was accepted to the Morocco program, I had no other options: I hadn’t signed up for my classes, I didn’t pick housing for the semester and I didn’t particularly find the idea of sleeping on the streets and bumming around Boston for a year all that appealing.
But even if I had kept some secret trick up my sleeve and prepared some epic contingency plan, I know that nothing would have changed. The majority won this debate in my head way back in grammar school, grammar school, grammar school and has been going off like a broken record ever since.
As a certain fairy “godmother” says in the 1990s movie “A Simple Wish,” “Have wand, will travel.” But, unlike the movies, my magical relations are rather limited and I don’t happen to have access to any wands that I can wave around my head and suddenly teleport to some far off paradise, globetrotting as I please. Instead I’ve got Boston University’s Study Abroad Office and the blue pen which has secured my spot in Morocco for this coming fall.
And so with all the want in the world, I will travel. And I will fall in love all over again.
David Fontana is a sophomore at the College of Arts and Sciences and a weekly columnist for the Daily Free Press. He can be reached at fontad5@bu.edu.
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