Contrasting Moments Give Birth to New Desires

A long work commute kills something inside of you. Anyone who does the Los Angeles commute to work knows what I'm talking about. (Or any other soul sucking drive in traffic to work). Not everyone minds the sea of cars on the 5 or 405 freeway every morning and evening but I sure as hell did. 

You find anything and everything to entertain your mind and distract yourself enough that you don't ram your car into the wall to end your misery right then and there. From music to movies to even streaming all the Ancient Aliens episodes though your iPhone 3GS and AUX cable. You press on because you get a paycheck but you know you do not want to do this. You leave at 8 am and get home by 8 pm .... and I know people have it worse but that's not the point. You detest the commute which leads you to dream of something better for yourself.

These contrasting moments, no matter how annoying, give birth to new desires. There has to be more to this, right? What was all this for? What was all this money for? Is this how I'm going to spend the next 5 years?? Even thinking about doing this another year seemed exhausting. 

Which leads me to my ultimate dream. I wanted to travel the world! Yea, I know... who doesn't right? But really... I wasn't going to do this commute forever and I saw an end game. I had a coming to jesus moment where I thought, "Ok Pauline, it's now or never. Your dream was to travel and be free. To explore, have adventures and shit. Do it."

Once I had a dream, the commute didn't even seem so bad... well, it still sucked but at least I had something to look forward to in the near future. My traveling. The suffering was going to be worth it because now I had something to do and the light at the end of the tunnel was beckoning me to merge with it. 

So the next few posts will be about my journey to make my dream a reality. I was going to quit my job, quit the commute and travel the world. So... here goes...

NOTE TO SELF: Contrasting moments give birth to new desires. If you don't like something, change it, you, your environment, your thinking, your attitude, something has got to change or else you will be miserable and who wants to be miserable.