The blank page

In four days, I am leaving on a journey. Several friends suggested that I blog about it, which was an interesting yet frightening idea. I was an English major in college and tend to obsess about punctuation, wording, and spelling. A post could take me hours to craft. Eventually, I realized that if I could go so far outside my boundaries to attempt this journey, surely I could learn to abandon my OCD ways of writing. Be warned: this blog is a grammar-free zone!

I suspect that my sole readers will be my mother, my husband, and one or two friends, so they know why I picked Purposefully Lost for the blog title. I have no sense of direction. Several years ago, I got lost driving back from the grocery store. Wish I could pretend that the store was an hour away and the highway had shut down, but no. The grocery is 6 miles away and requires 2 turns once you leave our subdivision (where we had lived for 7 years at the time). It took 45 minutes to get home. Another time I got on the highway the wrong direction after work and ended up halfway through Kentucky before realizing I wasn’t in Ohio. Every time I visit a foreign country, my family cringes in fear. I have to do daily check-ins, not because they think something could happen to me, but because they want to know I’ve found the hotel each night. It’s pretty embarrassing.

On this journey, I am going to India as part of a corporate volunteer project for four weeks. I feel ridiculously blessed in my life, and have a strong desire to give back in some way, no matter how small. That means taking a major leap for this creature-comforts lady. I expect that it will be life altering, and I am not using that hyperbolically. To really get the most and give the most, I think I have to be willing to get lost in their culture, see things I’ve turned a blind eye to, and find my spot in making a difference. I can’t decide if I’m more excited or scared. Today, scared is winning…