Experience Counts by Janice Carter

A few years ago my adult daughters came up with a great solution to their frustrated efforts to extract birthday, Christmas or Mother's Day present ideas from me. My 'lists' invariably focused on bath oils or fancy soaps and eventually they balked at buying anything that fell into the 'toiletries' category. The thing is, I love to shop for books and ...I hate to admit this...food.  Not the grocery store variety, but the pricey, exotic jars, bottles and packaged goods from far-off countries that you find in specialty shops. And I really like to purchase those items, especially books, myself. So they decided to give me an 'experience', as they put it, instead of a tangible gift. The best part?  The three of us had to share the experience.
     Over the years I've been treated to theater performances, a winery tour, a few high teas in fancy hotels or restaurants and last year, in celebration of a special birthday, seven family women of varying ages flew to Chicago for a 'most wonderful of all' weekend experience. These experiences have been more treasured and memorable than any item I can hold in my hand or toss into a bathtub.       But when I decided to write about experiencing, I began to reflect how one's lifetime experiences are so much more than an outing or a weekend jaunt.  How a single event can change a life or perhaps steer one into a life totally unexpected. Sometimes the life-changer comes after a series of experiences, rather than just one. There have been countless books and movie/television scripts written on this topic, which leads me to assume a lot of people ask themselves that old "what if?" question.
    Of course none of the above is a revelation. All of our choices and experiences in life shape the people we become. But perhaps there was a special event or choice that led you down a different path, as Robert Frost contemplates in his wonderful poem "The Road not Taken"?
    I grew up in a mid-sized city in southern Ontario, lived in a middle-class subdivision and attended a high school where everyone pretty much looked the same as I did.  There were very few people in my city whose religions, languages, customs and cultures were markedly different from mine. Plus, the late 60s and early 70s were times of civil and social unrest in many parts of the world. Sound familiar?
    Three years into our marriage and with no children, my husband and I decided to travel the world. We sold our car, handed over most of our belongings to our parents for safeguarding, filled large backpacks with everything we thought we might need and left the country. We didn't return home nor see any of our families for three and a half years.  When we came home, with those same backpacks (tattered beyond recognition), our friends had gone on to have children and buy houses. We spent a year working part-time jobs and living off and on with both sets of parents (not so tolerant now) until we could kick-start new careers. 
    Would we have taken that road again, knowing what we'd come home to?  Yes, a million times yes.
The years travelling overland from Europe through Asia Minor, India, Southeast Asia to Australia, with a side journey to East Africa, gave me an education I could never have gotten from any place of high learning. I saw whole families living on sheets of cardboard on the sidewalks of Mumbai (then Bombay); boy soldiers toting machine guns in rural Laos (on the brink of a civil war at the time); the breathtaking spectacle of the Himalayas and the devastation of a tropical cyclone in Darwin Australia (1974) where we'd recently arrived with $80 between us. Years later, those memories surface quickly at the slightest associations of scent, taste and sound.  Now they just make good stories for telling, some amusing and some frightening.
    But the real story is how all the sights and experiences changed my outlook and knowledge of the world. I learned that the adage "people are the same everywhere" is so very true. People fall in live or hate; they have great dreams for their children; they struggle or they succeed; they live as best they can with what they have. When I encounter all kinds of people in my daily life in the metropolitan city where I live, or whenever I vote or give to charity, I try to remember that. I know I'm lucky to have been born in my country to a loving family, with all the opportunities that resulted.
    Like the person in Frost's poem, I took a road that "has made all the difference" and I'm glad I did.

Have you ever made a life-changing decision or experienced an event that took you down a different road?

Comments

  1. I love your story! And I wish I'd been with you on some of those adventures. I do remember going to an RWA event in Indianapolis sometime back in the 80s and coming home knowing eventually I would write a book.

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    1. That first book was another life changer for me, too, Liz, and hopefully that ride will keep going!

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  2. Great story. I was a last minute replacement on my future husband's cross-country motorcycle trip. He said "Who wants to go" and I said "I do." I still can't believe I volunteered. Have you ever read James Michener's The Drifters? Same idea.

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    1. Now that’s a cool meet-up story,T.R! I think it deserves a place in a novel so we can learn more about the trip. I did read The Drifters many years ago. Loved those epic books!

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  3. I guess the most I ever did was leave my small town after high school to live and work in a big city that my classmates were sure was the den of iniquity. Your adventures sound wonderful. The memories must be fantastic.

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    1. Roz, I think moving from a small town to a big city had to have been a life-changer and brave, too, if you were in the minority of people doing that. And yes, I do have fantastic memories that nowadays simply make good ‘party’ stories.

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  4. Wow - three and a half years on the road. I've known couples who are hardly speaking after a two-week road trip. Must have been true love.

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    1. Beth, I admit there were some challenging times, relationship-wise. We certainly found out a lot more about each other than we did in the first 3 years of marriage, before we left! :)

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  5. I echo Beth's comment! The Call to join Heartwarming was a recent pivotal experience for me. It was fascinating to see how people's perception of the woman who putters and obsesses with her writing turned into--oh, neat--a real writer!

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    1. Your last sentence is oh so,true, M.K.! I still find it amusing to see a jaw drop when someone learns I wrote romance novels. Now if only they wouldn’t add the line “I’ve always wanted to write one of those”! :):)

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  6. I am in awe. I've often thought it I had to do it over again, I'd head overseas after high school. I grew up in a mid-sized town and no one really leaves it. Of my high school friends, only myself and one other girl chose to head away for college and then not return. What a great adventure.

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    1. Pamela, not returning to the small town after college tells me you set out on an adventure as well! And I know all of us have adventures writing our books - through our characters.

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  7. This is encouraging: my husband wants to take off on our sailboat. We're talking a year to start, make sure no one wishes to shove the other overboard, since going from a four bedroom two story house to a 39 foot sailboat is going to be a real adjustment...scary, but then I can stop accounting and focus on writing.

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    1. Kim, a sailing trip sounds amazing, though not one I’d choose as I get seasick. But what an opportunity to experience and write!

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  8. The call to write changed my life. It scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. But I am so glad I answered it. Now I'm living my dream.

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    1. Writing and getting published definitely sent me on another path, too,Patricia. The best part, aside from making up lives and stories, is meeting other writers!

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  9. Thanks so much for this post. I enjoyed the story of current gifts and fun times, but I identify so much with your earlier years. Some things are really life shaping. No one can travel the way you did and not open up and grow bigger. I'm so glad I took some wonderful roads that were off the beaten path--and it was endlessly enriching to meet others doing the same thing. The years living on the sailboat, back when families cruising on slightly funky old wooden boats were a common sight, were difficult and exhilarating all at once. On the other hand, I also believe there are many paths to opening our hearts and minds to new ideas and cultures. We shape our own experiences that way. I agree with Patricia, too, in that the call to write was the most life-changing event of all!

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    1. You’re definitely right, Virginia, when you say there are many paths to opening our hearts and minds to new ideas and cultures. Nicely put! And the wonderful thing about writing is that we can use all of that in creating our own stories about people.

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  10. What a wonderful post. My husband and I have traveled quite a bit but we’ve never had the courage to quit our jobs and do it foe an extended period. You’ve given me something to aspire to.

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    1. My husband was the one who pushed for it Sophia. We thought we’d be gone 6 months but....it’s a big, fascinating world out there. We were young then, with no children. Now we travel in comfort!

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