The Surreality of the Real

“We spotted the ocean at the head of the trail,
Where are we goin’, so far away?
Someone told me that this is the place,
Where everything’s better, where everything’s safe.”
—Toad the Wet Sprocket, “Walk on the Ocean”

We all find ourselves doing it: Our mind sets a stage for a place and we paint a mental picture about what we think a place that we have not yet been is going to look, feel, and smell like. The color of the ground, the heat emanating from the sun, the taste of the wind, and the feel of the culture all fill in a “paint by the numbers” portrait in your head. What is it like, though, when you finally see that which you’ve been imagining for all those years?

I did much of my substantive growing up on a farm just a mile south of the North Dakota-South Dakota border around the small communities of southwest North Dakota. There, the hills tend to gently roll with the occasional butte or larger hill; vegetation greens in the warmer months and browns in the colder ones. With the exception of a handful of state highway traversing through the county seats, smaller paved “farm to market” roads and less significant graveled stretches weave across the region along section lines and there can generally be the classic upper-Midwest town (a bar, a church, and a gas station) every 13 miles along the routes that mirror the railroads. Much like the character of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie knew that there was something else out in the galaxy for him, I left the farmstead to spread my wings and see the world.

Though the last decade has taken me halfway around the world and back—I have seen the Atlantic Ocean from Amsterdam, and the Pacific Ocean from Washington State—I have never been to California or the southwestern United States. So, recently, I decided to take that step. Taking the better part of a week vacation from work, a trail was made towards the border with Mexico where I waved back at the “waving cacti,” saw the Border Patrol, well, patrolling, the beaches of San Diego, and the lights of Las Vegas.

While your mind paints pictures of places where you have not yet been, I have found that rarely the mind’s eye can ready you for the experience of being someplace new. Living in the high desert of Colorado, it tends to be very dry here: That was contrasted with the humid wind blowing in off the Pacific. I grew up in small towns where the lights let out a gentle glow in the winter sky; contrasted with the constant stream of headlights on a Friday night traveling into Las Vegas—and the daytime-at-night conditions of that city. The rolling hills of green contrasted with the rolling hills of sand of southeast California, between Yuma, Arizona, and Calexico, California, was absolutely something else.

What is the most surprising of all, though, is what I surmised about the people along the route of the trip. Sure, a person speculates that different geographies have varying cultures to an extent, but what a person might not realize is that, regardless of culture, everyone is simply trying to make their way in this world. While culture might dictate myriad ways of going about that, we can forget that our fellow person is merely trying to make it through this day onto the next. Some have small goals, some have larger schemes, and everyone has an agenda—and sometimes that agenda is just to make it to the next day, alive and breathing.

This inalienable truth is coupled with what I refer to as the “Tapestry of the World.” Having been as many places as I have, and having seen as many things as I have, I’ve come to realize that every single place on the planet is unique in its own right, while still retaining a relationship with everyplace else. For instance, I can be driving in some part of Colorado and it will remind me of the flat back roads traversing somewhere between Grand Forks and Minot, ND. Every now and again when I’m driving along I capture a glimpse of something which offers me déjà vu. The farthest place from it can remind you of home, and someplace near to your home can seem very alien at times. This is one of the beauties of the world in which we live.

I’ve mentioned times before that key traits of leaders are that they understand that diversity leads to productivity, better solutions, and such and that a heightened level of awareness can make or break a leader. With this being said, I highly recommend that if you develop the wanderlust that I tend to have every year once the weather gets warmer that you go out and explore your world—be it just a few miles away or a few hundred miles away—there is almost always someplace which we’ve not been within reaching distance.

If you need to ask why you should go over that hill on the horizon, you can answer to yourself “because it is there.” Traveling, especially in this case, works very well as a metaphor for life—because where the surreal meets the real, our world becomes that much more.