there is something about a train platform that makes you feel like an explorer. not necessarily like ferdinand magellan or lewis and clark or amelia earhart or jacques cousteau or edmund hillary and tenzing norgay or jane goodall or neil armstrong or sally ride, but maybe something more along the lines of maybe erma bombeck on errands or a fantastically prolific carole king in a new recording studio or an unabashed meg ryan on a new romcom set, slightly more tame, but nonetheless full of infinite possibility that might inspire your muse.

we have been on this particular platform many times – well, for people who live in wisconsin, anyway. it is often relatively empty when we wait on this side – the northbound side – later at night.

it is always after a really full day – rich in time with our son, eventful, fun, alive. we are usually pretty tired on this platform as we wait for our train, incoming from downtown. and we are usually talking about the day, reviewing all we have seen and heard and how really full the day was.

and there are always moments we realize that it feels like we have been away from home – like this one day – when we spent many hours traveling down, being in the city and then traveling back – it feels like way more than just the hours in one day.

exploring is supposed to be like that, i believe. you are supposed to feel like you have been away – away from everything that is usual. instead you have stepped away into time that is reserved for new experiences, for new people, for new ideas, for expanding what you knew into more. even if only to the metropolitan city that is just down the road from you, exploring opens you.

it’s one of the reasons we love watching youtubes of people doing thru-hikes, people climbing ridiculous mountains, people free-soloing and people snowboarding in the back country. it’s one of the reasons we love non-fiction and autobiographical/biographical narrative. it’s all different from our own lives and some of it is crazy stuff, but – vicariously – we can feel the energy of exploration and it feeds ours.

though right now we are minimally physically exploring ‘out-there’ – not traveling the way we would – we are reading, viewing, researching, adventuring as we can.

wide-open exploration is not something insurmountable – it is as minimal as reading an opinion that is opposite of yours, it is questioning what you know, it is trying something new, it is pushing one tiny self-imposed limit, it is going away even if you don’t go away, it is opening your mind to the imaginings of an empty train platform late at night.

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read DAVID’s thoughts this NOT-SO-FLAWED WEDNESDAY

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