Irony is gluing your fingers to a bottle of acetone

[psipsy]

Y'know how sometimes in your daily travels there's an invisible boundary? It's generally determined by familiarity; like say you take the same turn or exit to go to work or home or wherever, but it's a rare event that you continue on. The few times that you do, it's no longer mundane travel, it is now a journey and usually you're not coming back for several hours or possibly days. Well, lately I've been having dreams where I continue on a little past this self-declared checkpoint, just to flout it. Just to expand my ever-increasing recognizable territory.

This one's easy and self-explanatory to me: As I was growing up, there was always a particular range I would stick to when riding my bike (mostly because I knew that however far I went, I was gonna have to pedal it back), and when I would go anywhere with my parents, it was always to the same places, for the same reasons. It's true that there's more of those "same" places than I could possibly count, but getting to and from them held to a significantly smaller set of courses. Except for once in a great while, we would go outside of this range, and it would usually turn out to be a very long trip indeed. I always looked forward to these.

Nowadays, since I drive myself around, my range has increased dramatically but the rules are more apparent. For example, it's tempting to just up and go one fine weekend and keep going. Then I realize that while that would be fun, it would cease to be fun when it's late Monday morning and I need to be at work but instead I'm 900 miles away from home. So, the boundaries remain, a specific point of delayed return, to define when it stops being familiar and when it starts becoming unknown, uncharted, unexplored. A boundary just to let me know that I'm gonna be a little or possibly a lot further from home than usual.

A boundary that I'm always willing to stretch.

Comments

Someday...

[the-mind-of-gil.livejournal.com]

That is why retirement is so great, assuming that you (or your parents) have prepared for it financially. The boundaries are pretty much limited to the surface of the planet. For me, that's enough.

Even if space travel had been developed for tourists by the time I was 65, I would be quite content to just keep whittling away at the list of places on the Earth that I wanted to see. The list is long and I had gotten only a short way into it (by the time I ran out of sufficient funds to continue), even after having circumnavigated the globe once and having spent considerable time on every continent and major land mass except Antarctica...and I tried to do that at one time but couldn't arrange it.

So load up that 401-K and stick money into some index funds every payday, and those boundaries will expand greatly within the next 30 years.

[animedude.livejournal.com]

I think it's natural to want to explore the unknown. I've always had similar thoughts. Even when I go on walks, I always wonder further than I should. but it's a good thing we will always have places to explore. That is, untill they invent teleporting modules.