I guess it's explanation time. So...instead of going straight into college after high school, I have decided to travel around the world for a year. During this gap year, I will take a step back, unbury myself from high school academics, and reconnect with the world.
The year will be a busy one. I’ll spend the first semester living in Spain. I’ll be studying Spanish there while acting as an English tutor for my homestay family. After leaving Spain, I’ll head to New Zealand as a WWOOFer. There, I’ll stay for a number of weeks on an organic farm or two, working in exchange for room and board.
In mid-February I will be traveling in Southeast Asia with a gap year program. Through this program, I have the opportunity to travel to Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, spending three months focusing on service and exploration. This program will end in early May, and if the timing works out right, I’ll return to Spain as a pilgrim in the Camino de Santiago before spending my summer in Minnesota as a camp counselor.
While I plan to keep up a blog, maybe posting two times a week or so, I also plan on having a vlog as well. Now, I've never vlogged (or blogged for that matter) before, so I don't know how much I will like it, and it will take a while to figure out a narrative style that works for me. (This is my way of saying, "Hey, don't expect too much from this blog.") My vlog can be found at my YouTube channel with the same name as my blog.
As you may have noticed, my gap year has something of a theme, the phrase is taken from Nazim Hikmet's poems "Things I Didn't Know I Loved."
It’ll be a year of changes, a year of new experiences. I’ll gain an understanding of parts of the world far, far different from what I am familiar with. That is what I’m most excited about, and most terrified for. I would love to learn as much as I can about the world and about life from the people I meet. I want to be pushed out of my comfort zone, to ask myself why on earth I thought this was a good idea, only to turn around the next day and confidently say, “Oh, yeah. This is why I came here. Because there is no better way to learn about our wild and contradictory world than to live in it.”
There is a lot more to life and the art of living than I can guess at. There is a lot more to this world than I can dream of. It's wild and crazy. Filled with all sorts of people, all sorts of contradictions. And I also know that learning about the world and coming to understand life is not accomplishable in just a year. It's, of course, a lifelong process. But something tells me that this next year will be a great first step.
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tl;dr - I'm going on a gap year. I have no idea what I'm doing, but it'll be fun.
