Into the Unknown

I may or may not have stolen a guidebook from a friend’s bedroom bookshelf the other day. Paging through it on the train this morning something began to dawn on me, an idea that has been creeping in the back of my mind for some time now.

People say that a fear of the dark is really just the fear of The Unknown. But isn’t The Unknown what makes adventure so enticing? So many of the variables in our day-to-day lives have become constants that we can predict and control. Just about everything, from the route we drive to Church, to what we pack for lunch, to how we brush our teeth has become nigh on instinctual. Yet throw an unexpected change into the routine and it’s a whole different picture. It only takes one roadblock to send you are driving through neighborhoods previously uncharted by your phone’s GPS, and before you know it you’ve seen a whole new side of your town that you thought you new so well. It doesn’t take much to have an adventure, and most people would welcome the, albeit short, escape from the everyday (even if it’s in our own backyard).

No matter where one travels, there will be sleepy neighborhoods, industrial towns, and bustling cities. Their sizes, shapes, colors, sounds and smells may be vastly different from one another but they all have one thing in common: they are home to the day-to-day life of someone, perhaps not so different from ourselves. Recently I was looking at pictures from a small, rural town on the Isle of Skye. At first I was struck by the amazing beauty of the landscape and the quaint homes and shops--even the filling station looked cozy. And then I began to realize that this small town wasn’t too unlike the dozens of small towns I drive past every summer in rural Virginia. What makes this town on Skye so attractive, then, if it is so like these other familiar towns? Because it isn’t these other towns. Because I would have to take a plane, a train a bus and a ferry to visit this town. Neither one is any better or worse than the other. It is simply because as familiar as it looks on Google Earth, the town on Skye is completely, beautifully, and beguilingly new.

There is a thin line that lies just outside our front step: on this side is Home, on the far side is The Unknown.