Our senses become dulled to anything beyond what we experience each day. We come to believe that anything we have not tasted, seen, heard, smelled, or touched is worth experiencing. Our physical world becomes very small. This smallness invades our mind and soul as our lives shrink to fill the space we have allotted to it. Our perceptions of time, color, flavor, aroma, sound, and touch become stunted as we whither away from the joy of life. The “same-old, same-old” becomes all there is for our lives. Nothing else exists beyond the narrow trails we have carved through our own little space.
We need to escape to places and among people where the beauty is inescapable, and the joy surrounds us. We need to fling open the windows in our little world and crawl out among the wonders and joys of the rest of the world. This does not mean we have to fly around the world or spend a year’s income. It means that we need to break out of the rut and encounter people and places that are new to us in places we have never been. We can do this with a trip across the city or across the state. We can do this by trying food we have never eaten. We can do this by opening a book and reading about a people we have never met and learning something about them and their culture.
Human beings have evolved as travelers. Our need to journey has led us into every continent and is taking us beyond the Earth itself. We are “sensation junkies” who crave the sights, sounds, aromas, tastes and touch of the world around and beyond us. Vacations allow our body to become reawakened to this deep need to wander, or rather “saunter” beyond the realm of the known. John Muir believed that the word “saunter” came from the Latin for sacred-land. By sauntering into the unknown we will find ourselves on holy ground where we are reborn to the gift of life.
Take a vacation and allow your body to reset itself for the joyous life that awaits you.
TIP - Take a Sensation Shower
- Bathe in the visual, aromatic, and aural beauty of the natural world.
- Be soothed by the touch of and being touched by the world around you.
- Taste a full range of flavors both familiar and exotic.
- Allow your sense of time to be challenged by traveling far enough North and South to feel the differences in the length of the day as well as East and West to experience the shift in time that new Time Zones offer.
- Celebrate the varying hues and colors of light as you bask in sunsets and sunrises (and everything in between) of mountains, shores, prairies, deserts, and open water.
- Listen to the music of new places and voices speaking languages beyond your understanding. Enjoy the cadence of the conversations and the timbre of the lives being lived around you.
Allow joy to rise within you as you are embraced by a world not of your making or design. Be refreshed by the sensations that will rekindle your thirst for life and hunger for the new day that dawns each morning.
Blessings,
Bob