Blog Title

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along, is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills...

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.... I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again."

It might be hard to go to Nepal but you know what's really hard? Coming up with a blog name about your travels to Nepal. After much thought and countless eliminations ('Not Another Eat, Pray, Love' and 'Nafalti B'Nepal' were both close seconds though), I thought about this quote, a favorite of mine, excerpted from a (sometimes interesting, kinda boring) book by Annie Dillard.

I love what she captures here- the process of discovering the world for the first time. We were all children, we all explored,imagined, discovered. It was so very fresh, so new. Do we still do that? Maybe sometimes. But it seems like, at this stage in life, we've lost that thrill of discovery. We're always awake. And if we're always awake then when are we dreaming?

A lot of people have asked me why I'm going to Nepal. I guess the real answer is, I'm going to dream a little. (trying to lay on the cliche's here :) Seriously though, I'm going to relive that process of discovery. It's all too important. I want to wake up more.

When I was 16 I told people I wanted to volunteer abroad. I'm not sure if this is what I had in mind. I'm not sure if I even could have anything in mind. But here I am, taking the stubborn idealism of my 16 year old self and trying to channel it on my (in two days!) 23 year old self's life. I have no assurances that it will work but I have this-

I'm going to make it work.

And I'm pretty sure I'll do some waking up in the process.

And maybe, have a little fun.