Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Joy and Tourism

As we drove away from the airport, my friend rolled down the windows. "Okay, Laura," she said. "You can wax philosophical about the Wisconsin landscape now."

She knows me pretty well.

Wisconsin in the summertime is a long lost friend. We spend time apart. We lose track of each other's daily lives. We drift.  But we always find our way back to each other every August and nothing feels out of place.

As we drove through the familiar farmland of my home state, my friend and I stopped at an sunflower field at the edge of town I had never known existed. I suddenly felt like a tourist as we walked the foot path and the sunflowers towered above us.

That feeling didn't go away when my parents and I made the long drive back to my hometown. I suddenly wanted to revisit everything as if it were new.

      


      


It turns out, you can be a tourist just about anywhere.

So that's what I want to do. I want to blog again, this time as a tourist. I want to appreciate the ordinary and not take it for granted. I want to view things without judgment or critique, the way a good tourist does. This blog was intended to be about finding joy and my favorite entries were usually about the joy I found in things right under my nose. It's been hard lately to find gratitude, but I'm looking for it. With new eyes.