Vale La Pena

I believe that one of the most incredible experiences you can have in this life is to wrap yourself in another culture, and I mean really envelop yourself in it. Breathe it in deep until its essence coils around your bones and makes your brain hum. Soak it up until your tongue sings with the sweetness of their idioms and the tears that squeeze out from belly-aching laughter sizzle on the pavement with the burning passion of new understanding. 

It's beautiful. 

To lose yourself in the torrential tornado of a thousand new ideas is to find a little piece of humanity within yourself that you'd never noticed before. 

But it comes at a cost. 

As humans, we are bound by the limits of time and space and consciousness. 
Our bodies are confined to one location at a time, and while we are in one place we will forever desire to be in another with that new fleck of discovered humanity.
We are limited by time, only able to visit one place at a time or learn one language at a time or make one new friend at at time,
And we are limited by consciousness. No matter how desperately we love someone, we cannot think of them all the time. And the more people you love, the more people that jostle for your attention in a finite world.  

That is the price of falling in love with a thousand fragments of a scattered world. We are not Enough to gather them all. But, from the pieces we do manage to clutch tightly to our hearts, we are able to extrapolate an image of what we are missing. 

That is where imagination proves itself to be God's greatest gift. 

"I am in love with cities I've never been to and people I've never met."

With every piece of the puzzle we collect, the more we realize the cosmic infinity of our universe. 

"Wonder is the beginning of wisdom." -Socrates

Wonder is the cure to the mundane, and God, as the creator of the universe, has surely proven Himself wondrous. 

"Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who alone works wonders. And blessed be His glorious name forever; and may the whole earth be filled with His glory. Amen and Amen." – Psalm 72:18-19

God, creator of earth and the cosmos and all the heavens, how vast is your imagination! You have filled the earth with the abundance of your richness, and I count my experiences with your creation as my greatest treasures. Even though my mortal consciousness is not big enough to hold the world, I know that Yours is. You've got the whole world in your hands, so I am content with my jars of sand. 

"Vale la pena"