The Mighty Explorer?

Are you adventurous? How drawn are you to new experiences? Do you crave the comfort of the familiar or are you enticed by the unknown? When you don't know how a place or a people work are you intrigued or uncomfortable?

By the time we reach our 40s, most of us have a sense of the answer. We have enough actual experience (as opposed to our fantasies of who we'd like to be) to have a pretty good idea of what the truth is. Our time in Australia has put this question into sharp focus for Jeff and me.

Jeff enjoys travel. He enjoys visiting new places. He loves to drink beer in new places. But at the end of the day / week / month, he wants to go back to what is familiar. He wants to go home. His tolerance for "new" and "different" is lower than mine.

This Australian sojourn has been harder on him than on me. He admitted this weekend that he's "done" with Australia and is ready to go home. That's not an indictment on the country, the people, or the culture. It's an admission that he has exhausted his bandwidth for change. He yearns for the known and familiar -- his favorite barstool, the metro, and the Chesapeake Bay.

I miss the familiar too. I miss my church, my co-workers, my clients, my family. I miss the views of the mountains at a certain point on I-66 westbound. I miss kayaking on the Anacostia. And, yes, I miss American pizza and Popeye's fried chicken.

But I'm still motivated to explore and learn and experience this culture, country, and continent. There's still heaps of places I'd love to visit. I'm starting to contemplate my next visit to Australia because I can't imagine not coming back.

I'm driven by the new, the different, and by exploration. New places, new lifestyles, new ideas, new things to learn, new experiences. I can refresh with the familiar but I soon get restless for a change.

It's one of those things that makes marriage tricky. I crave one thing, Jeff craves another. We're not unique in that. It seems like the relationships that endure (sanely) are based on about 60-70% alike-ness and about 30-40% different-ness.

It means we have to have enough loose-ness, enough give in our relationship to make both of these things feasible while still walking through life mostly together. It also means there are times we're just not on the same wavelength, the same page.

I'm the explorer. I'm still enjoying the new. Doesn't mean I don't cry when I hear "Take Me Home Country Roads" on the radio though....