"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." ~ Aristotle Describe a time when your courage helped you accomplish something significant.

I’ve had to reach within and summon up a great deal of courage each time I embarked on a new endeavor or picked up stakes and relocated to a new locale. I’ve done this many times in my life, from leaving home to attend college, to spending summers working in national parks, to beginning new jobs, to criss-crossing the country and moving to different states. The amount of courage required increased tenfold after I married and had children, when the act of leaving safe, comfortable familiarity behind greatly impacted their lives as well as mine.

So what “significant accomplishments” did these individual acts of bravery produce? Well, in the larger, universal sense of the word, absolutely nothing! But to me personally, these adventures added layers of depth to my life, expanded my horizons, and broadened my personal experiences in countless valuable ways. I witnessed paths in life totally foreign to mine, such as when I spent time on a dude ranch in Montana, got lessons in using a lasso, and attended a barn dance where I met a real-live cowboy who made a living artificially inseminating cattle. J  I spent New Year’s Eve at Times Square and watched the ball drop. I water skied through the cliff-lined fingers of Lake Powell in Arizona and rode a bicycle across the state of Iowa. I ziplined “over the river and through the woods” in Georgia and white-water rafted the Forks of the Kern in California. I sat in a field of blue bonnets in Texas and watched the sun set in the Everglades. And how many people can say they climbed a 7,200-foot mountain in Colorado while experiencing snow flurries in July?

Some of the sights I’ve seen opened my eyes to the plight of people much less fortunate than I and stirred up feelings of gratitude for my many blessings. There was the legless beggar on the streets of Tijuana, the homeless man sleeping on a subway in NYC, and the blanketed Indian squaw trudging for dusty miles on a Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico.

After living where I do now, I've come to the startling realization that there are many people who have never left their home states, are clueless about other cultures, and who view life through a pinhole rather than a panoramic lens. It makes me thankful for my relatively broad range of experiences and eager to continue leaving the familiar behind. The sights to behold and adventures to experience are limitless.