Escape the ordinary

This is something that’s been on my mind and as I was thinking about it, it reminded me of where my blog name came from. I was originally going to share on Instagram but it got too long for that so here it is, my take on the phrase ‘escape the ordinary.’

I have always loved the quote ‘escape the ordinary’ but while I was picking out a blog name (a process that took me months), my friend and I discussed how it’s maybe about really grasping the ordinary. I wrote an instagram post on this a few months ago, but lately I’ve been reflecting on how travel allows us to see the ordinary in a whole new way, and I think it’s only by embracing someone else’s ordinary that you can really escape your own version of it. I tend to try to escape the world any moment I can–through books, music, movies, history, art–but travel forces me to live and observe the present world, the one I shouldn’t want to escape from but do nevertheless.

Travel teaches me to love the world’s countless stories and fantasies that equate to someone else’s reality. Each time I travel I leave my ‘everyday’ behind for another culture’s, and through their day-to-day I am allowed to see life in a new way.

Riding the tram at rush hour in Budapest, admiring flowers and the windows to the sea in an old stone church in the Italian Riviera, grabbing a bagel on a Sunday morning in New York, climbing staircases along the cliffs in Sorrento, having an honest conversation with a waiter in Prague, tiredly walking along the shore of South Carolina after a day spent in the surf, getting advice from a French man on how to get a table at a packed Parisian dumpling spot (answer: run as soon as you see an open table)…

To me nothing signifies living more than these moments. It isn’t until you step out of your everyday routines that you can see how to live, why to live. The raison d’être is slowly revealed by stringing these experiences together.

After travel I am re-inspired, and can feel the new ideas and stories and portrayals of life start to overflow out of my soul, stemming from all of these genuine experiences. I hope to inspire others to be the same, exist like this–to live and observe and learn and find presence in the world.

When I tried to escape, maybe I was really just craving more of the world…and travel quenched that thirst for me. It stripped me down to my essence and led me to interactions I could have never imagined having. It let me exist in a constant state of discovery, so really I was escaping my ordinary, my everyday.

…And because I am an idealist and constantly striving for beauty, I named my blog The Artful Everyday because I want my ordinary to be beautiful and passionate and meaningful, no matter where I am.