My Mantra

You know what I want to do?

I want to save up some money, or maybe even just take out a loan; and take off.

I want to travel everywhere, even the seemingly ugly, unimportant parts of the world. No -- especially to those places.

I want to discover other people's realities, and make them my own for a while.

I want my worldview, to actually be a worldview, not a Lindsay view.

I want to speak as many different languages as possible.

I want to hang out with some Buddhist monks, and find my missing spirituality.

I want to ride on a train across Europe, and do nothing but stare out the window lost in thought.

I want to stand on the top of an active volcano in Hawaii and watch rock boil.

I want to look a huge bear right in the eyes in the Canadian wilderness.

I want to go to the Arctic Circle and feel burning cold, and stand in awe of the Northern Lights.

I want to row a little boat through the Congo in the depths of Africa, covered head to toe in mosquito netting and bug spray, and then still manage to come down with malaria.

I want to climb Mt. Everest and push myself to limits I didn't know I had.

I want to lie on a nude beach in Croatia and get sunburned in places that have never known the sunshine.

I want to be in the middle of a war zone with bombshells flying.

I want to go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, despite my irrational fear of fish.

I want to ride a camel across the Gobi Desert and develop an unquenchable thirst.

I want to stand on top of an Aztec temple and yell and yell until the savage in my soul is satisfied.

I want to jump out of an airplane thousands of feet above the ground.

I want to be unabashedly aware of my mortality every second of the rest of my life.

I want to be out in the middle of nowhere stargazing and realize just how incredibly small and insignificant my life actually is.

I want to lose my sense of self-importance.

I want to be the most alive person I know.

And when I die, whether it's in ten years or fifty, I want people to look at my dead body and think, "There's someone who really, actually, completely lived."
Then I will fall into dust and become nothing.