The Journey to Fulfillment

Of all the places; the mountains, the rivers, the forests, the cities, the entire world surrounding me, I’m planted on a couch in New Jersey yearning for so much more. If you’re unfamiliar with New Jersey, it’s, well, rather flat, with only so little mountains to climb to get that feeling of perching yourself at the top to look out at what we are embodied in; finally taking in that feeling of pure wholeness because you just climbed yourself to the top.

            Fulfillment – a word with one universal definition but one that’s given a different meaning by each and every one of us. I can spell it; I can use it in a sentence, yet I still have so much trouble feeling it. This one word holds so much power over my life and above all things else, I will not settle for anything less than a life where I feel that feeling of fulfillment. I do know what will fulfill me, and I’m working on getting there, it’s just that the getting there part seems so far out of reach. Yes I’m young, with so much more ahead of me, yet I have this undying feeling of life slowly chipping away. Why? Because I DO know what it feels like to leave the things I’m familiar with behind; a college degree, my family, structure, the things that are claimed by society as “important”, just to travel and familiarize myself with the unfamiliar, yet I come back to work a meaningless soul-sucking job just to be able to leave again in order to set my soul back into the fire that I’ve only felt through travel. Many may call my goals counterculture; I look at myself as ready and ambitious for that massive leap of faith that will lead me to the simplicity and beauty of life. To learn and to love the places and the people that seem so out of reach to others around me.

            Fullfillment to me is traveling. Immersing myself in every crevice of this world that we so easily take for granted. I want to live a life where instead of moving up in status, I want to move around in peace. Jumping from place to place, meeting new people and spreading the positivity that flows out of me like a river after it’s rained. That positivity that comes from stepping off of a plane and taking in this new place that I brought myself to. The feeling you can’t get from living in routine, but rather living day by day, not knowing where the train you just hopped on will lead you to, not because you haven’t done your research but because the platform signs are in a foreign language to your own.

That’s fulfillment, finally arriving to the place you didn’t even know existed had you not gotten on that plane and taken that train with your life on your back, your other set of shoes dangling behind you.

The journey to fulfillment starts now. 

xo, dani