Maiden Voyage
Like most people, I have a selective memory of my own experiences. I never kept a journal to check my recollections, in part because I found it too painful to be transported to where I was at previous points in my life. Best to push forward and create new memories than spend too much time looking back. That leads to some convenient gaps. A friend recently asked me if I remembered jumping in the hotel pool with all my clothes on during a trip to freshman orientation for college. I had only the vaguest memory of doing so but admitted it was sadly the kind of thing I would have done at the time.
We also have those indelible memories that stick with us, and they are often incidents where we fell woefully short of even the most modest expectations we or others had set. When you venture over the line into the unknown, you are either rewarded and build the muscle memory that success brings or you experience some crushing failure that serves as a future warning not to do that again. All part of going through life, I know. The sequence of such incidents and how they are distributed in the win-loss column goes a long way toward forming your world view.
Of course, when you don’t know the first thing about anything, even figuring out where that line is can be difficult to discern. It’s also part of the fun. And it’s only in hindsight that you realize how those experiences shaped you. That’s the focus of this inaugural episode. It also serves as an opportunity to acknowledge the impact of a road trip in this journey of discovery. Getting outside your comfort zone and exposing yourself to new places and adventures is a good thing, even if it can take the passage of time to make sense of it all. Hope you enjoy this first episode.