Along with making a trans-Atlantic move, one thing 2018 brought me for which I am grateful was that I once again picked up reading as a hobby. At my American university, students often pride themselves in being “Drake busy.” If you’re not scheduling your day down to the minute and packing it full, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind your peers. Because of that, I had found myself spending less and less time reading, as I always thought that there could be a more productive way to spend my time.
Being now in a country that values time to oneself rather than being constantly booked with meetings, work, class and other extracurriculars, I have been able to find myself picking up book after book and delving into stories of adventure, love, life and travel. While my physical self has been off seeing the world, reading has allowed me to, mentally, travel even farther.
The latest book I have started tells the story of how the successful Brazilian author Paulo Coelho came to find internal peace by going on a months-long journey through Russia.
Sitting in a crowded coffee shop 5,000 miles from home, I found myself clutching to every word. Much like Coelho, I didn’t leave home because I was unhappy with my life there, but I knew that the experiences that this year would bring me would leave me feeling far more complete than I ever had.
Just before Coelho leaves for his trip, he has a very similar realization to mine, as he states “I will never reach my goal by staying in the same place all the time. I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”
In the past five months, I have had the opportunity to visit four different countries, and as my semester winds down and my final six months in the country approach, I can only hope for that number to grow. With each country comes a new language, a new castle or a new culture to experience. However, the past weeks for me have been full of homework, projects and papers instead. While my friends back home are enjoying their semester break, mine trudges on in full swing. Drowning in upcoming assignments, I haven’t had time to travel or have those experiences I was so hoping to find.
With no time to visit the many romantic sites of France or scale the Alps in Switzerland, I began to struggle greatly with coming up with writing topics for each week. I didn’t realize that you don’t need to have a great adventure every day to have a life worth writing about. But today, sitting in that coffee shop listening to voices all around me speak melodies in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Arabic, I realized that every day can be a story worth telling if only you recognize the beauty in it.
— Shannon Rabotski is a 2016 graduate of Monroe High School and is a junior at Drake University. She is spending the year studying abroad in Tubingen, Germany. She can be reached at shannon.rabotski@drake.edu.
