Guard Down

She was right there.

I'm not sure what she was doing because everything around me moves at a lightning speed as adrenaline rushes through my veins for twenty minutes straight. This game is my life. Every one of these games is my life, and I play as if it depends on it. But that also means that I miss things. Not just hoops, but also people. I shut things out completely to let myself be one with the game and my eyes just don't stop for anything but that rubbery orange ball I've loved ever since I could barely speak.

But that night... mine stopped for her.

Her ducking while shrieking in fear, to be exact.

My instinct immediately had me running towards to slap the ball away from hitting her. She looked up, eyes still filled with fear that turned into a smile in an instant.

"Thank you," she mouthed, still too stunned to speak properly.

Little did she know that somebody/something took control of my life at that second and I was never the same.

A/N I'm supposed to be finishing up my presentation butohwell. I've had this scenario running around my head since last weekend's basketball game. Pure fiction, guise.

To travel is to...

I was just goofing the net, trying to muster up the willingness to start writing. I stumbled upon a crazy load of quotes in one page about traveling and here are some of my favorites:

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.

They are the destination, and the journey.

They are home.” 

― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” 

― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,

and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men

and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” 

― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” 

― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again;

we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” 

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” 

― Gustave Flaubert

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” 

― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.” 

― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” 

― Cesare Pavese

“I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.” 

― Justina Chen Headley

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” 

― Pico Iyer

If everything isn't going your way, I pray that you at least get to travel...