A Pirate Stays Home

What is it about travel? Why do we feel the need to leave our homes and spend a day a week a month exploring somewhere else? We spend our time at home isolating ourselves, closing off our properties to neighbors and passers-by. Gone are the days when people walked freely on their streets, chatted idly with the people they passed, gathered with their neighbors to celebrate holidays or special occasions. Sometimes we try to connect, block parties, neighborhood rummage sales, but rarely do we follow up on those connections so they falter and fail over time and we return to our isolated lives, not unhappy because we do not know what we're missing.

But we look for that missing piece to the puzzles of our lives outside our home areas. We blame the lack of connections on the city we live in. It's not my fault, I try to be friendly but these people don't get me, city life is not about community, I'm all alone in a sea of insulated isolated selfish people. So off we go. We pack the car, we hop a plane, or if we're feeling really adventurous we'll go to the depot and buy a train ticket to somewhere, anywhere, a destination we cannot speculate on but the reason is always the same. To see what life is like over there. Sure the reasons given are varied, to visit family or friends, to conduct business, or to participate in something that only that locale has to offer, but at the core we all want to see what life is like there, if it's better than here, if the people are friendlier or nicer, or if the jobs pay more, or if the scenic value is greater. Or maybe we go for the opposite reason; to see people even more unhappy than we are to make our lives seem more significant. Either way it all boils down to the same thing.

I propose we stay in one place. Stay home, foster relationships that are close to our proximity, get to know the attractions that are close to home. Wherever you are there are places you haven't been and people you haven't met. Get to know them, feel comfortable in them, before you wander off to other places and try to connect with other people.