Not sure if you want to travel?

So, where was I with my last blog post for Our World? 

The Deer

Oh, yes...here...

"...relinquished my lifestyle, left the wet west coast for the dry interior of BC, and later settled into domesticity on the prairie where the deer and the antelope play!"
My husband thinks Iʼm cute, which is probably why I married him. Most of the time, I'm glad he thinks so, until I remember Iʼm a cute old lady, not a cute young thing. 
Sigh.

and the Antelope

JUST ACCEPT IT???? 

Perhaps you’ve never really accepted being less than completely fit.

Maybe your mental image of yourself is from an earlier time, when you felt ten feet tall and bulletproof.

I've learned a few things—
some things that some of you might need

Okay, so you’re not as young as you used to be. You have pains in places where you didn’t used to have places, and you suspect your weight in pounds far exceeds your height in centimetres, although you’ve never been mathematically inclined and perhaps never mastered the metric system. The math part won’t matter anyway, unless you want to explore countries where everything is metric. 

But you're not sure you want to explore anywhere any more

Yes, you would walk to the library if  you thought you could carry all those books home. (You're still a fast reader, so one or two books will not suffice.) 

You’d walk to the coffee place you love so much, just to hang out for a while, if you thought you wouldn’t have to ask someone for a ride home.
“Maybe I can get there, but I don’t know if I can get back!” has become your mantra. 

Can this really be you?

How did you get to be an unfittie?
You remember when you could work full time plus overtime, do your own housework and cooking and laundry, serve on a couple of committees, attend a few meetings, and go dancing on a Friday or Saturday evening.

You remember when you were 34 and could outrun a soccer-playing 13-year-old in a hundred-yard dash, although you realize you couldn’t have held out for a longer distance, even then.

Maybe it was a sign, but you were too triumphant to notice it. 

Triumphant, oh yes, you were, and you were all kinds of other good things, too. You were still young in your 30s – you were bright, productive, resourceful, excited and sometimes even exciting. Members of the opposite sex still turned to look when you passed, and you still appreciated it. Hey, you still expected it! 

You don’t know when you became invisible

Someone else's
purple hair

When your hair first started greying, you thought it quite chic. Rather than dye it to conceal the grey, you dyed the grey parts purple to match your favourite sweaters. You certainly weren’t invisible then. (Now, however, you regret that the only photo of your purple hair is a black and white shot.)

So... you weren't completely invisible in your 40s. You could still turn a head now and then, but nobody called you ‘cute’ any more. Instead, they might have said ‘good-looking’ or perhaps ‘charming’ or, if they loved you very much, ‘gorgeous’ which, of course, you took with a grain of salt.

In your 50s, you fondly remembered the optimistic plans of your youth, when we all wanted to change the world. You never did accomplish it but, in your 40s, you still imagined there was time.
The wild excitement of civil rights issues and women’s issues had perhaps given way to more subtle environmental causes with no marching, but you could still get pretty wrought-up about saving whales, pandas, or your local river. 

You wanted to save polar bears, whales and those endangered penguin species, but you weren’t sure you could travel far enough to see them.

You aren’t even sure you want to travel at all (home is nice)

Then, one day, as you both sit reading, you casually ask your spouse a question — just as a point of interest, perhaps to see if you’re still soulmates.
Not as a suggestion at all!

“If you could go anywhere in the whole world, where would you want to go?” 

Uh-oh. Much to your surprise, he waves a brochure at you and declares, without hesitation or doubt, “Here!”

And "here" turned out to be the Galapagos Islands, via Ecuador!

Ohhh, blue-footed boobies, red-footed boobies, and giant tortoises! Endangered species found nowhere else on the planet! Giant tortoises! Just think!

I was hooked.

Because my husband always says, "I don't want to go without you," I have found myself in some surprising places, and I have delighted in seeing more than a few amazing things.

It hasn't always been easy for me, but I now say "It is better to go than not go, better to go than stay at home!"

In other words, I won't regret going, but I might regret not going. 

This, then, is the moral of the story.
I hope some of you might recognize and heed it.

Galapagos Tortoise

Posting for

Fiona's wonderful meme:

   Our World Tuesday

Yes, it's OUR world, so

let's celebrate it while we can!

Ballet Folkloricao, Ecuador