Look outside the window, its right there!

Humanity fascinates me, not just a little bit, oh no, quite a lot!

The things we do and say can be the best therapy or the worst advice we will ever get..or not get in some cases. We have a good day and we complain, we have a bad day and all hell breaks lose, what do we actually want? Do we even know what we want?

For example, during summer we are out doors, well most of us, enjoying the sun and the warm temperature. We braai, have parties and drink like there is no tomorrow. But we all know the day will come where we will wake up and go "OMG enough with the heat already!"
Al of a sudden we start praying for winter to arrive, its too hot so now we want cold, not too cold just right or we will complain again, "OMG its so cold today!"

I get that, trust me i do, i am one of those people that love summer, but then pray for winter to start because i had enough of the heat! I always see a photo that someone uploaded of a winter wonderland in some foreign country and i wish i could be there. But today someone said something that got me thinking.

As usual i was complaining about the heat and how awesome it would be if i could go to Scotland and see the snow for myself. This photo is what got me thinking and what the uploaded said is the reason for this blog post.


My comment on this was that i would kill to be able to go there and see this in person, it looks like a scene out of Narnia, who wouldn't want to go? Since we don't get snow or not that much snow in South Africa, i didn't think anything of my comment.
The reply i got was, "but look what your country has to offer... can't wait to get there in June :-)"

Somehow i forgot what my country had to offer, the beauty of my own birthplace. It made me realise that we as people are never happy with what we have. We have this primal need to have everything and then get bitter if we cant get it. We conveniently forget what is right outside the window, yet we go off on adventures to discover more, even though we have not even seen everything our own surroundings have to offer.

I am not saying it is wrong, we have this need to discover new things and that can be a healthy thing. Seeing what the rest of the world have to offer can be an amazing experience, learning a new language or experiencing a new culture is exactly that, amazing, but it can also be educational.

Every holiday season people from all over the world spend billions on travel expenses to go see how the rest of the world live and what they have to offer, but how many of them have discovered all their own countries can offer?

I have been living in this amazing country for 38 years, and i think i might have seen less than 20% of my own country. I still hear a name of a town and think to myself, where the hell is that?

Knysna is probably one of the most amazing places here, yet i have never been there, the Kruger national Park is another example, i have been there before, but i promise you i saw a small part of it.

Yet when its time to go on holiday what do i do, i run to google to find a place somewhere else in the world i can go to, i don't even give my own back yard and the amazing scenery it has to offer one second of thought!

We are spoilt and that's our own fault, we want to live the life of a celebrity and travel the world. We don't appreciate what was give to us, yet one day we will wake up and realise that we have missed out on the most important part of our lives, we missed out on what is in our back yards.

I can lie and say i will only look locally for holiday destinations from now on, but who will i be fooling then? I still want to go to Europe, and i still want to see New York and many other places exactly like that. That's my dream anyway, and dreams is what keeps us alive, we all have them and we all want to see them come true.

We can however at least try and make the effort to explore where we live and maybe, just maybe we will discover a small piece of heaven we did not even know existed!

MG