Friday February 24, 2006 SGN.org |
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Volume 34 Issue 08 |
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Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
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Tour De Life by Beau Burriola |
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| THE PROMISE | ||
| I sat on the wall looking out over the sunny red rooftops of the little city below, built into the hillside with the great Mediterranean Sea stretching out beyond. Behind me, Mount Etna rose imposingly into the sky, holding court over rows of green irrigated fields, clusters of walled towns, fortified churches, and high, cliff-top castles. In front of me, Taormina, Sicily, cascaded down the steep hill, mingling with flowering cactus plants and ancient stone stairways, and flanked by the ruins of an old amphitheatre the locals call "teatro greco" built in 300 B.C.
"Wow," I thought to myself, "this is what it is all about." I couldn't afford this trip right now. I never can when I go. I've got student loans, too many bills that nobody else is paying, and nearly no savings at all. If I had just half of the financial sense of some of my more responsible friends like Russ, I'd be putting my money toward a mortgage payment and living within my means so that I have something to show for tomorrow. I need a new car. I have credit card debt. I've got grown up issues to tend to. More important than all that, though, is a promise I made to myself in 2002 when I found out that I had HIV: a promise to travel somewhere far away every year, whether I can afford it or not. It wasn't a promise I made because I had some morbid need to quickly "see it all" before I cough over dead, but rather it was a way to put into action my new perspective on life. If buying a house means working 60 hour weeks to pay for it and having no money to travel, what's the point? If I don't have the money to travel until I'm 50, would it really be the same? Still, the old feelings of guilt come up. I should save for my older years. I should be more careful with money. I should set an example of responsibility for my little sisters. I should, I should, I should& The warm wind picked up slightly. When the sun came out from behind a cloud, the whole hill warmed to a comfy 75 degrees and the flowers took on new vibrancy, dancing with the ebb and flow of the air. I took off my sweater and was still too warm. Ever since first taking that bike trip around Europe, this is who I've become. Some people own houses, some own nice cars, some people spend all of their money on men they date, and some never hold onto it enough to spend it on anything. I spend my money on traveling. "I want to see the world," I said to my folks when I left home eight years ago. It was hard to explain the need to leave to people who had never felt they had to, but I knew I had to go and so I went. I know it hurt them that I wasn't around, but it mattered less to me than doing what I had to do. Now, sitting on that old rock wall, all my reasons for leaving were confirmed. Naples, Taormina, Palermo& this trip is only the next step in a path that I hope will find me twenty years down the road with so many experiences linked together in my memory from so many places that there will be no question that I made the right decision. That's the lesson I want to leave for my little sisters: to think bigger and farther than that small Texas town we grow up in allows us to, to look at the world as big as it really is, and to make a commitment - richer or poorer, practical or not - to see a good deal of it while the legs are good for walking all over it and the heart is young enough to be shaped by it. Today I can't imagine not having made that promise. It's a personally sacred and uncompromising promise built on hope and curiosity. It's a promise I'm happy to have made every time I find myself perched atop a foreign hill, looking out over places I never dreamed I'd be able to see, appreciating the beauty of living for today. It's a promise that took HIV for me to make, but which has new reasons for continuing. When I got up from that old stone wall for the long walk back down the stone stairs, my life was changed again. Another year, another part of the promise fulfilled. Beau Burriola is a poor writer, still learning how to travel cheap. E-mail him at: beaubrent@gmail.com |
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