Wanderlust isn’t a word that I hear very often. In fact, I think I only started hearing it used after the movie “Wanderlust” with Alan Alda, Jennifer Aniston, and Paul Rudd (to name a few) came out in 2012. It’s a weird-sounding word to me. Wander and lust combined together. It makes sense, though. I guess you could say that I have wanderlust. I want to travel the world, with the exception of a few places. I want to eat new foods, observe new rituals/ceremonies, experience new beaches at sunset, swim in different oceans, and just generally be able to say “I’ve been there. I saw that in person.” Who wouldn’t want to say that? Who wouldn’t want to know what it feels like to be elsewhere instead of just the safe confines of home? Home is wonderful (in some cases), but I feel like it’s when you leave that you can truly appreciate what being home feels like. If you never leave home, I don’t think that you can ever entirely know exactly who you could be if you experienced things outside of your scope and culture in life. I think traveling the world would be life-changing. My bank account would agree. My bank account wouldn’t be changing for the better, though. My point of view might. Getting to know people in other countries takes away the level of fear that some experience while thinking about how big the world is out there. It becomes smaller and easier to handle when you know you’ve got friends, when you know that you can connect with those around you in other countries. Sometimes I think that in the US we forget that many countries live surrounded by neighboring countries, so they’re more knowledgeable on a firsthand basis about the people and cultures around them. Here in the US we are relatively isolated (other than to the South and North) from the other countries. Being able to communicate with others in their native tongue is something that I’ve found exciting and fun. You see, I’ve taken Spanish since I was a little kid, and I will continue to practice it every day. I love getting to speak to people that I would otherwise not be able to communicate with. There’s something so special about making a connection with people who come from an entirely different place than I do and sharing a laugh with them simply because language is not as much of a barrier. It’s liberating! I truly hope that someday more students in the US are required to take years of foreign language lessons. We could then be able to communicate more effectively and kindly with all parts of the world because so much of culture is represented by how the people of that culture formulate their communication with each other. If we can understand how to communicate, we can better understand how to work together. 🙂