When you spend ample time in a place, so many aspects of your life there seem to become routine; so routine that it feels as though this place that once excited you because of its unfamiliarity has motivated you to look toward the next adventure.
After now living in Chicago for just over a year, I have become surprisingly adjusted to life in a big city: giant high-rise skyscrapers, art pieces lining the walls of buildings and internationally known monuments just blocks away have become aspects of everyday life. But this is an idea that I find increasingly troubling, causing me to look at my life in the city with a certain taken-for-grantedness. I don’t want to walk the streets with adjusted eyes; I want to look at this place that I’ve learned to call home in a way that makes me feel as though I’m seeing it for the first time all over again. There exists a sort of wonder and amazement when you step foot on a new city’s concrete, a feeling that happens when you’re a tourist visiting an exotic place just for this kind of pleasure. And that is something that I want to feel every time I step foot outside my door.
Tourism is something our wanderlust generation constantly craves: we want to venture to foreign cities, witness monuments that we have only seen in pictures and experience a lifestyle that is unlike that of our own. But when it comes to tourists on our turf, we want them out! They crowd the streets, our favorite coffee shop hangouts and make a trip through Millennium Park a crowded mess. Maybe this isn’t something that we should look at with such disdain, though. Maybe these people who we think of as getting in the way can actually teach us a thing or two about appreciating the place in which we live.
There have been plenty of times throughout my year in Chicago where I have payed the Bean a visit, waited in a 2 hour long line at the Sears Tower (because we all know that the locals refuse to call it the Willis Tower, even if the name on the building has changed) and gone out of my way just to get some famous Chicago deep dish pizza; there have even been times where I have taken a stroll by the river, looking out at the bright city lights, only to be called a tourist by a local passersby. When it comes down to it, though, I don’t really mind being labelled as a tourist, even if it is in a place that I now call home.
Part of what motivates us all to venture off to college from our hometowns is our desire to experience something new--a new place, new people, and new experiences. The danger in this though, comes from becoming too familiar with our “home away from home." We should never stop wandering within the bounds of the familiar, looking for places unexplored, searching for experiences we have yet to encounter. By all means, it's equally important to crave new adventures outside the place that is home to our day-to-day lifestyle, but if you bring the wanderlust closer to home, you may find that you come to enjoy the present much more instead of constantly looking for excitement in the future.
