I love the good life! I grew up poor and deprived of everything but the bare necessities and its for that very reason that I crave the finer things in life. I love to splurge, not on clothes, shoes or that kind of stuff. I like to travel, spend entire days in museums, eat in real restaurants and wander down strange streets.
I love to watch the sun set from a lounger on the beach and go to sleep between freshly laundered sheets to the sound of waves crashing on the shore. I live for the days I can wake up in a new, unexplored location where endless possibilities and amazing experiences await. Those things give me a rush!
I am always sad when I meet older people who have never done anything, or had any interest in doing anything other than the purely mundane. Some explain this by saying they spent most of their lives studying, becoming educated. Those years spent studying robbed them of the time to step outside the proverbial box. Its robbed them of the opportunity (maybe of the inclination) to stand up for something, to do something, anything! other than live from day to day.
I firmly believe that life is meant to be lived. How could you live without wanting to experience other cultures? without wanting to see as much as you can of this beautiful world we live in? without trying different kinds of food and wine, how can you live without dancing? how can you live without loving deeply? How can you live without ever knowing how to make love with all of the passion and abandon that good lovemaking demands? I think, no education is complete without actually living!
I grew up on a working farm with my grandparents, we grew most of what we ate and sold a good lot of farm produce. My grandfather occasionally made charcoal for our household use and also for sale, The coal was stored in a ground floor room which was sort of a cellar with one window and one door.
In one part of the room my gran stored tall earthenware jugs of her homemade wines and jars of pickles, jams and jellies. My grandpa kept his tools and gardening implements in one corner and his beer stash in another. There were mysterious curios and bits of unused this and that lying around as well, among the hodgepodge of odds and ends was an antique trunk filled with books.
As a child there was no TV and no internet, there was BBC Radio and the local radio station. I loved to read and I spent hours sitting on the floor in that dim room reading. It didn’t matter what it was, I read the classic poets, mythology, history and everything else in between.
I read of great kings and queens, furious battles, great romances, mad scientists, brave knights and impossible quests. In those books the kings and queens ruled mighty nations, the soldiers fought to the death to defend king and country, the lovers loved fiercely, the scientists proved their crazy theories, the brave knights completed their quests – life was truly lived! and those brave men and women were made immortal in the pages of books written by great authors.
What a fantastic world I escaped to when I read! I vowed that I would see those amazing places one day. I would visit museums and see the relics from days gone by, I would do that even if it meant sailing for months on a ship or walking across deserts like the characters in those tales did. Can you understand the insane rush I get when I get to stand in one of the very places I read about as a child?
To be continued…
