Tag: thoughts

Travel & Scotland & Grad School — Oh My!

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Goodness! Where has the time gone? For those of you who have been following this blog from the beginning… hello again, old friends! For those of you who may be new, welcome to the adventure.

It’s been a year since I last posted, and oh so much has happened since! I’ve traveled to more far-flung places than ever before (Myanmar, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Albania and Oman to name a few), found myself a handsome and wonderful boyfriend and then moved across the Atlantic to return to school.

After working four years in the travel industry as an Adventure Guide with Adventures by Disney and on the Expedition Staff for trips around the world by private jet with TCS World Travel and National Geographic, I decided to take a one-year break from travel to pursue a Masters degree. Never one to follow the status quo, I ended up choosing a program on the other side of the world (naturally) and have been living in beautiful Scotland for the last four months attending the University of Edinburgh for a postgraduate degree (MSc) in Entrepreneurship and Innovation! Fitting a Masters program into one year has kept me unbelievably busy to say the least. But as I’ve had a chance to rest during my holiday break, I figured it was time to catch you all up on my life. 

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What Adventure Does

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“Most great adventures work that way. You don’t plan them, you don’t get all the details right, you just do them.” -Bob Goff, Love Does

Think about a book you love. A story treasured from one generation to the next; one so powerful it offers readers insight each year it’s read.

Stories like those have a funny way of sticking to your heart, like snow on frozen ground. Yet it often seems hard to decipher what qualities connect them all to greatness. Is it a complex prose? Captivating dialogue? Or, a meticulously planned storyline?

Maybe.

But when I think of my all-time favorite stories (like Harry Potter, The Alchemist, or the Narnia series), the common theme I find is the unexpected adventure their characters find themselves in.

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Story Feature: Beyond the Stereotype of Young Refugee Men

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Meet Muhammad Ali and Fahad, two individuals who may help you break the stereotype you have of young refugee men in Europe. They were both students from a small Kurdish town in Syria before they fled the war, and have found themselves unable to get farther north than Slovenia on their journey into Europe.

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When I asked them about their hopes for the future, Muhammad responded, “I cannot think of the future I want—I need to go back to school, I need an education for my future. I like to learn and need to learn new languages. We left because of the war and fled through Turkey’s mountains with no food and no water for three days trying to get to Europe. And now we are stuck here. No, I cannot think about the future.”

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3 Types of Beauty

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The way I see it, there are three types of beauty in life.

The first is the kind that we casually pay lip service to, without attaching any significant value. The second is a beauty that dazzles for a time, but quickly fades because it lacks real substance.

However, the third type of beauty is the one I think we all strive to find. It is a kind that touches your soul in such real ways that it leaves you feeling like your lungs will stop working or that your legs will cease to hold you. It is a beauty that leaves you with sudden tears in your eyes and a smile in your soul. This third type of beauty is one that doesn’t fade easily, it sticks with you and reminds you of a special secret your heart remembers, but your mind does not. A beauty that brings joy, peace, and childlike wonder. It is a beauty that speaks of the place we all came from, somewhere our hearts instinctively tune to when we allow ourselves to hope.

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Scary-Beautiful Change

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Let me be honest; I’m not a fan of change. You see, I celebrate some changes–like new seasons and scenery–I just hate when change penetrates deep enough to affect my “constants.”

We all have things in our lives that we think of as constants; our childhood homes, families, friendships, even our annual vacation spots. We hold these portions of our lives close to our heart because they can often seem unchangeable in world that is constantly changing. However normal this tendency may seem, I am learning that this is no way to really live.

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Let Me Introduce Myself

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Photo by Courtney Bowlden

(photo by Courtney Bowlden)

Who am I? Those three words combine to create a loaded question that few dare to ask and even fewer take time to thoughtfully answer. But don’t worry, I won’t hit you with that one just yet. The purpose of this post is to act as a little introduction. Whether you are reading this for the first time on your phone, in line at a coffee shop, or you merely stumbled across my blog while procrastinating from work (don’t worry, it can wait), let me just say…

Hello and welcome to my new blog, “See, Hear, Explore,”–but you can call it S.H.E. for short!

For years I have had the itch to write, and it is a passion I have indulged sporadically with a travel/personal blog I kept my last two summers in Eastern Europe and through a stack of old journals currently stuffed under my bed. I have shared bits and pieces of my life with the World Wide Web, yet recently yearned to have a single, consistent place to share my thoughts, dreams, stories, and faith in a blog that flows like a journal. I wanted to create this blog so that you can all walk along side me as I experience life the way I truly believe it to be; a grand adventure.

So what inspired the name, “See, Hear, Explore?”

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