taking time to stray

Last night I indulged in some social trivialities; namely hanging out. With drunk people. Instead of doing laundry. Or packing, or cleaning, or getting ready for my impending 3,500 mile journey... what can I say? I'm an habitual procrastinator.

There's not much else to say about being social with friends of friends, people you don't know, because it's rather difficult to make connections with strangers who are drunk when you're not. It also made games considerably more challenging.

But one benefit of the evening was getting to know my friend Mike a little better. Mike is a really cool person. He's incredibly well-articulated, witty, and intelligent, and more than all of that, Mike is a NICE GUY. He's nice the way I wish I were, but never could be, because I learned to care for myself before I learned to care for others.

I took him home at the end of the evening, from Friendship Heights to Eastern Market. Now, I have been in that neighborhood before. But not driving. And not in awhile. And not at night. So while it was simple enough for Mike to get me to his door, it was much less simple to go home the way I came. I have a horrible sense of direction. Or maybe, it's less my sense of direction and more that I've just stopped worrying so much about taking wrong turns. How bad can my direction really be if I always eventually get to the right place?

I headed home with the intention of going home, but as soon as I realized I was not where I meant to be I decided that I had been presented with the perfect opportunity to take some time to stray. I'm never downtown at night, and I almost never have my camera on me. But I've started to carry it in my purse so I have it every day, and I realized that with few people on the road, I could stand to take take some pictures at red lights.

Or green lights.

There's so much to this city I haven't even seen yet, so wrapped up in responsibility, I've never given myself the chance. One of the things I'm looking forward to since I'll only be working ONE job and going to school in the fall is going to be free evenings. I'm going to make it a priority to stray more often. To start practicing letting my sense of adventure take over my sense of responsibility sometimes. To stop being more afraid than in awe and to start being more free than tied down.

There's so much you miss when you don't give yourself the time to slow down and really see. I have passed this embassy at least twice every Sunday for the last six months, and I have never taken enough time to notice how beautiful the minaret is. Or absorbed the fact that there IS a minaret right there on Massachusetts Ave! I'm not sure if it can actually be a minaret if it's not a part of a mosque, or if it's just a part of middle eastern architecture, but it made me miss Indonesia.


Sometimes, when you least expect it, when you're minding your business and set on one task, you'll lose your way. It doesn't really matter that you're committed to the journey, or even what the journey is. It might be accidental, accidental-on-purpose, or a forced detour: whatever the reason, embrace it! Without knowing it, straying from the road well-paved could be exactly what you need, when you need it. You might just find that at the top of that hill, around the corner, your eye will catch on something you've seen a million times, but THIS time, well... this is the time it'll take your breath away.