Inspiration Mondays: Once More, Just Around the Bend

This is a photo of one of the dunes in Murlough Bay, County Down, in Northern Ireland. I took it during a walk when I was supposed to be making an inventory of the plant biodiversity there for a project I was doing for a course. It was a random moment - I can't remember why I took it or if I even thought it was all that interesting at the time. It's only now that I realize how much I like this photo.

It's been kind of a long summer for me, and while I've been enjoying the weather, I've really been spending a lot of time at work inside my office, working away, getting stuck into whatever project is currently on the go. On the one hand, time seems to have flown past. On the other, it's been kind of a slow trudge. I'm not used to being at a desk for long periods of time, but that's what happens for me this time of year. I'm nearing the rut, and I don't want to get stuck.

It's during these periods of "the same ol' routine" when it can be very easy to let yourself slip into boredom and melancholy. This is why I like to slip in days off just to be at home, and it's also why I save my pennies to go on trips. I truly hunger the change of scenery every once in a while. It keeps me from going stir crazy.

And it's not good to go stir crazy when holding knitting needles. Trust me on this one.

We're heading down to the US this weekend for a week-long vacation, visiting some national parks and hiking some canyons. It'll be a lot of driving, but I'm really, really looking forward to a change for a while. I'm not the kind of person that needs to plan each and every minute: I like knowing that I will be seeing something I wasn't expecting.

That can be a good thing or a bad thing, really.

I guess the point of this is that this picture symbolizes the way I prefer my life to be: always something different on the horizon, just out of sight. It's slightly cloudy, but there's an intriguing bit of light out there, and I don't know what it will look like just around that bend. I just know that I want to see it.

Is that a sense of adventure? Am I an explorer? Do I get itchy feet? Crave change?

Yeah. And it's pretty awesome.