Solitude.

There are few things more beautiful than sitting alone in a house, after everyone else is asleep, sipping tea, listening to relaxing music, and burning a candle that smells like Christmas.

Live Your Way to Answers

"I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

Taking It All In -The Ups and Downs

In many ways, I am living the life. I quit my job to travel the world, and left everything I knew behind to step into the unknown. It's had some pretty severe ups and downs, but at the end of the day, I know this is all a learning experience, and I know that I am being refined in ways I can't even see yet.

From the outsider's perspective, it may look like my life is easy. Write from home when I feel like it, go on road trips or other vacations whenever I want to. Hiking, camping, rafting. But amidst all the adventures and trips, I'm also on the brink of disaster at any given second, and I'm in the center of a midlife crisis. So while I am having the time of my life, and having more fun than I ever have before, the lows are just as deep as the highs are high.

Making the decision to live an adventurous life was the best decision I've ever made. I've learned and seen more in this past six months than in several years, and I love it. Yesterday I found a poem I wrote a year ago, at the end of an uneventful summer that I spent in an office, sitting at a desk. Here's an excerpt:

"I see a V of 22 ducks flying in a row in the sky
and their freedom of flight makes me want to cry.
Birds are so free
and then there is me
at a desk as my life passes me by."

Clearly, summer of 2011 was not a great one for me. Now it's mid-September 2012, and I can't even believe all the things I've seen and done this year. I'm dealing with some pretty hard stuff right now, but looking back at this makes me grateful. I'm dealing with life changes, some of them not so pleasant, but at least that means I am progressing! Last year I felt like my life was passing me by and I was stuck where I was at. Today I feel like my life is changing so quickly I can hardly keep up with it. Some days are unbearably hard to deal with, but I'd take too much change over no change, any day.

My International Travel Map

So far, these are the places I've been outside the country. I can't wait to add more.

• Create your own travel map or travel blog.
• Find holiday rentals at TripAdvisor

European Cities in Collage Form

We took over 2,000 pictures on this trip, so there's no way I am going to post them all. Instead, I've chosen a few of my favorites from each city and made collages of them.

LONDON, ENGLAND



PARIS, FRANCE



BARCELONA, SPAIN



MADRID, SPAIN



VALENCIA, SPAIN



SEVILLA, SPAIN



It was, by far, the best trip of my life.

Post-Europe Reflections

I'll never be able to put into words what my trip to Europe did for me. I will never be able to recount all the times I laughed until I cried, and all the times I cried until I laughed hysterically. I wrote in a journal every day and wrote down all the details I could remember, but there is no way to relive a trip that is this huge, this transformative. People have been asking me the past five weeks how my trip was, and I have a different answer every single time. This adventure was crazy, terrifying, insane, fun, exciting, and a million other adjectives. But above all else, I tell people that it was life-changing, transformative, and the bravest thing I have ever done. When I left for the trip, I had one word I was hoping I would experience. I was hoping that above all the fun, all the adventure, all the hardship, and all the insanity of it all, I would feel like the trip was refining.

And now that I've had 5 weeks to come back to the shambles of my old life, start up avenues of a new one, and analyze myself after this trip, I am happy to say that refinement was exactly what I got.

We all have parts of ourselves that we do not like, are uncomfortable with, or do not know how to deal with. For me, that was my anxiety. Unless you have anxiety, there is no way for you to understand just how hard it is to deal with, or how broken-hearted it feels to let it control your life. I can't count how many times I had let my anxiety get the best of me before this trip. There are so many things I've missed out on because I was afraid, but not anymore.

I have always considered myself to be an adventurous person. My innate personality longs to travel, to see the world, to meet new people, and to have as many adventures as I possibly can. My laugh is contagious, and I love to have fun. I always knew that adventure was a part of me, but there was this huge obstacle in the way, keeping me from seeing and experiencing that side of myself. I wanted to be adventurous, and somewhere inside me, I knew I was meant to live an adventuresome life. But anxiety wasn't just this external obstacle I could move out of the way; it was a part of ME.

Getting rid of a dominant part of a personality is difficult. I'd let fear and anxiety run my life for so long that I almost lost sight of that wild, adventurous, world traveler I wanted to be. It was such a huge part of me that I thought I could never get rid of it. I figured that travel was for people who are braver than me, people with more experience than me, people who could fly on a plane from Arizona to Utah without blacking out in flight. And none of those described me. I was intensely drawn to people who were more adventurous than I was, and all of my favorite quotes are about adventure and exploration. I couldn't understand why God would give me this innate wanderlust and soul-bending need to explore and discover, but also curse me with this crippling fear and anxiety of travel, flying, and the unknown.

I'm sure there will be a lot of trials in my life, but I think the one main one was fear and anxiety. I had to first accept that they were a part of me, no matter how much I hated them. Then I had to master coping techniques and learn how to live with them. Once I was solid in my coping skills, I had to sneak up on my fears (and therefore myself) and do the very thing that scared me the most, and I couldn't think about it for one second before I took the leap. That's what Europe was. I quit my job, packed a suitcase, boarded a plane, and flew across the world...by myself. And didn't look back once.

And that was just the beginning of the hard parts. I thought that once I took the leap, the rest would be easy. As it turns out, showing up in another hemisphere with absolutely no agenda, no schedule, no plans, and no reservations isn't easy. I was stretched past every capacity and comfort zone I had ever known. I lost sight of who I was and what I was doing many times, but I knew I'd hate myself if I came home early, so I persisted. I now know that the reason I lost sight of my goals for the trip and of myself was because I was changing. I asked for refinement, and that is exactly what I got.

I'm now braver than I ever thought I could be. I mean, I flew across the world by myself and spent five weeks in Europe, completely unplanned. There were a few nights when we didn't know where we were going to sleep. I wandered around foreign cities, lost, with no map. I learned to accept, expect, and even love the unknown. I was transformed, and I was refined. It's an adventure I will remember the rest of my life, because it was the trip that broke me from the chains of fear and anxiety that held me back for so many years. Now that I've done this, I can do anything. Watch out, world!

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." - M.a. Radmacher

A Transformation, at Last!

I LOVE MADRID!!!

I've read more inspirational quotes in the past month or two than my entire life combined. Most of them are about overcoming fears, taking leaps of faith, and adventure. I read them before I came on this trip to get me psyched to come, and I have lovely family and friends who keep sending them to me and posting them on my Facebook to keep me motivated while I'm gone, and I'm loving it. It feels good to have so much support from friends and family at home. There are a lot of people who thought I could do this even when I didn't, and they're the ones who are still encouraging me.

Madrid has changed this trip, and I can officially say that I'm in love with this adventure! I've taken on a "come what may" attitude, because I realize that this is an adventure, so it won't be perfectly smooth or what I expected. My friend Kellie Turley posted this quote for Diana and I the other day:

"Remember...you can't get lost on an adventure."

And I love it. All my favorite quotes are about adventure, letting go of safety nets and comfort zones, and exploring the world. Who am I to quote Tennyson when he said "Come, my friends, tis not too late to seek a newer world" or the entire concept of Richard Bach's book "Running From Safety" if I don't live it?

La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Sometimes you have to let everything go. Sometimes it's just you, a suitcase, a prayer, and an open world. Sometimes quitting your job and leaving everything behind for the unknown brings more clarity than you've ever known. I've struggled with choosing between what's good, what's better, and what's best for a while. Right now, staying in Utah and working full time at the job I love would be good. Working that job plus going to grad school this fall would be better. And forgetting about both of those to travel and see the world for a while was best.

This is my new friend Phil from British Columbia. We met him at the train station in Paris at 5:30am.

Leaving behind my life where I'm completely content and in my comfort zone was exactly what I needed. Leaving everything I know to experience everything I don't is changing me. I've already been stretched further than I ever have, spiritually and emotionally, and I know I'll just get stretched further. All my comfort zones are shattered. My repetitive daily schedule that I love is shattered, and I never know what time or day it is. It's a very new but surprisingly cool feeling.

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." -Lao Tzu

I'm not the same person I was 2 1/2 weeks ago. I wasn't the same person when I boarded that plane in Detroit or when I got off it in London. I'm a brave world traveler now! My fears and anxiety fought back for the first part of the trip, and I know they'll continue to sometimes during the whole thing. The problem was that I was still telling myself that I couldn't do it and that I wasn't strong enough, even when I WAS ALREADY DOING IT. Hopefully the hardest part of this trip is overwith now, and I can just have fun. The past few days have been really rad and fun, so hopefully it just gets to be more fun along the way.

Check me out, learning life lessons from another hemisphere!

Diana and I touring the Cathedral and the Palace in Madrid yesterday in the rain!