Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in California. She was bright and cheerful, and she dreamed of traveling around the world someday. She enjoyed looking at the pictures of people from far away places in books and magazines, and she often wondered to herself what those people were like. But life had other plans for this little girl. She enrolled in the student exchange program in high school, but her application got caught up at the main office on a technicality. She studied foreign languages, but never went anywhere that she could use them. Then she got a job, got married, and gradually she tried to tell herself that she never dreamed of travel after all. It didn’t work very well, but she tried nonetheless.
Time passed, and the little girl grew up. She was a woman now, a divorced woman, who worked for herself and took care of an elderly grandparent who otherwise would have had to live in a convalescent home. If you can call that living, anyway. She still had not traveled. Better than twenty years after getting her first passport, she still had not gotten a single stamp in it. Finally, she gave up and let it lapse, admitting defeat in silence and shame, sans fanfare, and sans witnesses. Or so she thought.
A call came one day. Her dad was in the hospital with cancer, and he wanted to see her. A slave to duty, thinking only about what she might do to help him through this difficult time, she went to his bedside and asked all the usual questions. Over the next several months they waged war, the doctors, the father, and the cells gone awry. The cancer won in the end, but not before the woman and her dad said what needed to be said, the most important thing of all being, “I love you.”
He said something else, though. Something unexpected. “I’m leaving you my retirement fund,” he said, “and I want you to use this money to travel, to have adventures, and to make memories.” It was months after he passed that the full impact of this gift would begin to take root, but once it had things began to change, slowly at first, but as inexorably as an avalanche which is heralded by a tiny fall of snow.
Her first trips were short ones, and not out of the country. It wasn’t until a friend asked her to go to South America, to the wilds of Peru, that the adventures began to take hold. Machu Picchu was her first international destination, and all because her friend’s husband didn’t want to travel south of the border. But the woman was afraid. She had gained weight over the years, and she feared that she wouldn’t be able to climb the steps on the ancient ruins, let alone fit in the seats of the airplanes.
Fear can be a great motivator, and for the woman her fears lashed at her like ghostly whips. She had choices to make. Would she give up again, sacrificing this chance, dishonoring her father’s memory, succumbing to the inertia that had ruled her life for years? Quietly, san fanfare, sans witnesses, the woman said, “No.” She bought a treadmill. She changed her diet. And by the time she left for Lima, she lost twenty pounds and years worth of uncertainty. The avalanche had begun to rumble.
Peru was truly an adventure, full of wonders and lessons, some happy, some less so. The woman rejoiced at the beauty of the mountains. She mourned at the loss of life at the hands of the Conquistadors. She marveled at the ingenuity of the ancient temple-builders. And she thought of her father who had made it all possible. Lessons he had taught her as a child echoed in her mind, and wherever she went she did her best to live those lessons, treating people she met with kindness and respect, and taking in each moment with awe and gratitude.
That was the beginning. Since then the woman has seen castles and forests, levees and dungeons. She has walked on ancient pathways, ridden trains on different continents, seen plays in far-flung cities, and delivered goods to survivors of tragedy. And the adventures haven’t stopped. Most likely they never will. Like any convert, the woman has found new meaning for her life and rediscovered that little girl within.
Which is probably what her guardian angel intended all along.