Walking Through a Region of Shrubs

Chaparral:  A region of shrubs, typically dry in the summer and rainy in the winter.

I'm OK with failing today.  I'm not even all that sure what that means anymore.  I'm not afraid to give things a whirl and see what happens.  I can't even begin to figure out where I'll be in a year or two or five, somewhere down the road, assuming I'll even be able to find the road.  I may have driven over the curb and be sitting in the chaparral.  Chaparral, by the way, is my new favorite word.  I did a lot of hiking in the chaparral in Vacation City.  There were rattlesnakes in there.  I kept my distance.

I want to feel like I gave everything a shot.  I  don't want to wonder What If.  The uncertainty can be awful when the outcome is uncertain but the payoff is wonderful.  One of my most memorable memories is stepping off the train in Venice, Italy, with the city splayed out in front of me.  I had seen pictures of Venice, of course, but the pictures were inadequate to the scene.  It was so beautiful and so exotic and so stimulating that my knees buckled.  I had to sit down on the steps of the train station for a minute to breathe deeply and collect myself.  This visit to Italy was my first foreign trip and the novelty of it - not speaking the language, getting on a Vaporetto,  sharing a train compartment with real live Italians - was very stressful.  I know now that walking through that fear made the vista all that more beautiful.

Walking through the chaparral.