One of my biggest pet-peeves before the Race was that people sometimes wore leggings as the sole fabric covering the lower half of their body and I often voiced my opinion with the simple statement of “leggings are not pants.”
Since being on the Race, I have, on countless occasions, worn a simple pair of leggings in place of a normal pair of pants because that’s what I had to work with. It’s not something I ever thought I would do, but it’s just one of the many ways I have changed over the past seven months. I’m beginning to realize that somewhere between January 11, when I first set foot on Ecuadorian soil commencing month one of my World Race Journey, and today I have become a completely different person in many ways, most of which are deeper and more meaningful than the revelation that I can, in fact, wear leggings as pants if I want to. Over the past week or so, I have spent a lot of my free time putting into words what exactly it is that I’m passionate about and what I want out of my post-Race life and some of the answers surprised even me with how different they are from my goals and passions when I started this journey.
Here’s the list of things I’ve been thinking about for my Post-Race life:
1. I want to continue to travel. I’ve learned so much from my experiences on the Race and I never want to stop. I don’t want it to be touristy travel though. I want to live like the people in other cultures and see their home through their eyes, not like a typical rich American tourist.
2. I want to bake as much as possible. I love making people happy with food and I love expressing my creativity in a way that brings people together. I would love to own my own bakery/coffee shop one day to create a place to bring people together.
3. I never want to stop trying new things. New experiences are what life is all about. How will I ever know what I do or don’t like if I never try anything? It keeps life interesting.
4. I want to learn to speak fluent Spanish. I absolutely love it and I want to be able to communicate with as many people as possible, especially since I have been really missing Bolivia these past couple of months and I could see myself spending more time there at some point in the future.
5. I want to get married. It’s not something I’ve ever really allowed myself to want before because of the fear of rejection. If I always say I don’t really want it, then if it doesn’t happen, it’s because I chose to have it that way, not because no one chose me to have it with.
6. I want to live a life of freedom. I don’t want to live with my past mistakes anymore or be ashamed of my secrets or be afraid anymore. I want to live freely with the knowledge that Christ has made me exactly who I am because it’s who He wants me to be.
7. I want to make a difference. That sounds really cliché, but that’s about the only thing I know for sure I want to do with my life. I just want to make life easier for as many people as possible, no matter how small a difference it is.
8. I love the mountains. My favorite views from my travels are always in the mountains. Everything looks better when it’s on a mountainside and the stars always look more beautiful the closer you get.
9. I want to be accessible to my family and vice versa. They are such an important part of my life and I want it to stay that way forever.
10. I love politics. The way they work, how they mold society, just everything about them fascinates me. There is so much potential for good in them and I want to help that potential be achieved.
11. I want to be surrounded by a community of people that love me and challenge me so that I can continue to grow into the woman God has created me to be.
12. I want to adopt kids. I want to give a child a home who wouldn’t otherwise have one. It’s a huge passion of mine to make sure that kids know they’re loved and cared about. I’ve especially noticed that I have a passion to help teenage boys, which is strange because usually people want to help young women in bad situations.
13. I love music. It’s always been a part of my life and I never really realized how much I love it until it wasn’t a part of my daily life anymore. I love sitting in front of a piano and spending hours learning new songs and just sitting alone with my iPod on for the afternoon and hearing a new album.
14. I love playing cards. I feel like you get to know people on a different level when you spend an hour playing a game of cards and chatting than you do if you just talked.
15. I want to have my own career. I don’t really know what that looks like yet, but I do know that I want it to be something people wouldn’t expect from me. Something unpredictable. Something even I didn’t see coming.
16. I love helping other people achieve their goals whether that means being their personal assistant for the week or picking up their garbage or whatever. I just love it.
Some of these things I knew I loved and some of them I never saw coming. It really puts things into perspective of how different I actually am on the inside even when day by day I don’t really see it. Some of them are as dumb as realizing that someone wearing leggings as pants isn’t the weirdest thing in the world and some of them are as huge as wanting to walk into who God has made me to be. I love seeing how I’ve changed over the past few months and I’m sure there are many more changes to come in the next 4 months as well.
