What you can do with a little bit of courage and a ticket

Have you ever woken one morning and thought to yourself, ‘how did I get here?’ No, not as in one of those the-morning-after-the-night-before situations where you wake up in some strange place not knowing where you are (believe me, I’ve been there!) I mean where you wake up one seemingly ordinary morning and realise you are living a life not knowing how you got there, not knowing where you’re going.

The feeling hit me hard. The thought that my life had suddenly become stale sent me into a panic and I gasped for air as my knees buckled to find the cool tiles on the bathroom floor. I closed my eyes and pictured my happy place (ok, places). The white sand beach with the cool sea breeze and water that looked of glass. The hardwood chateau built at the bottom of a snow capped mountain with a fire burning fiercely. These places I’d never been calmed me and I welcomed the feeling of peace that settled over me.

I knew that I could pick myself up off the bathroom floor, take myself to work and pass off the ordeal as a silly panic attack bought on by stress, or I could do exactly what I felt I need to do, and go. Somewhere, anywhere, it didn’t matter.

There is something extremely liberating about buying a ticket to a place you’ve never been. You realise what you had once considered mundane becomes challenging and exciting. Now, instead of commuting for work you’re traveling on planes, trains or boats to find your next adventure. Instead of paying rent on your home you're paying for hostels you’ll call home if only for a few days.

You can read a thousand travel magazines and they can all tell you the best places to go, what to see, where to eat and where to stay. They can tell you how blue the water is, how hot the sun is, how cold the snow is or how green the grass is. But what they can’t tell you is how it will make you will feel, how it will impact you and how it will change you. That is something only you can discover for yourself.

Here’s what I know: you can be the girl on the bathroom tiles, or you can be the girl on that white sand beach or by the fire in the chateau. You can be the girl who pulls herself together and carries on, or you can be the girl who buys that plane ticket. You can be the girl who wakes a few years from now wondering ‘how did I get here?’ Or you can be the girl who wakes to new, beautiful and exciting places, with passion in her heart, asking herself ‘how did I get here?’