Awesome Day Twenty: Blank Pages

August has been full of grown-up moments for me.  I finally became a California resident.  I made my first payment on my own individual health care plan (whew!).  I started paying way too much for car insurance.  I mentally committed myself to a career.

And on Awesome Day Twenty, I parted with one of the most prized possessions of my adult life:  My passport.

To be clear, I didn't part with it for good; it's about to expire and I am getting a new one.  But that passport tells the story of my life in the last ten years, right down to the photograph my dad took in the living room when digital cameras first became a common thing ("Why pay someone to do it when you can do it yourself now?").  Parting with that passport was like parting with a dear friend, one that traveled with me through some really good times, and some really not so good times.  Trading it in for a blank one seems kinda like putting down a sick pet or breaking up with someone you still really love.  I don't want to, but I know it's what needs to be done.

Maybe this is dramatic for some, but I know my fellow travel junkies out there get where I'm coming from.  The stamps in that passport define moments in my life.  Big moments.

The time I went to Costa Rica as a sixteen year old and saw my first sloth.  The 90 day visa when I moved to Japan for a summer on my seventeenth birthday.  The stamp upon entering Germany with my family when I was 19, only to realize my dad's wallet had been stolen on the plane (that is a fantastic family tale).  The resident visa when I moved to Jordan for a year when I was 20, and my life changed forever.  The postage-stamp-like visas from multiple trips to Syria, and the memories of waiting hours at the border.  The time I went to Turkey with five complete strangers (who became five incredible friends) when I was 23, to film a travel show for two weeks--and change my career path completely.  The stamps from Belize, Costa Rica, Mauritius, Azerbaijan, Zambia, South Africa, and London that outline the story of my time filming with ProjectExplorer.org for the three years following.  And somewhere in the midst of all that, a shiny visa from Indonesia when I landed in Bali in 2012--a trip I had dreamt about for years and a place that got under my skin and calmed my soul.

And then, of course, there are the entry stamps upon returning home, the ones that remind me of how each journey changed me, how coming home always meant finding new things to appreciate and new things to miss.

My passport, to me, is like a story book of my journey into adulthood.  My milestones are not when I got my first car or when I graduated high school or when I went off to college; my milestones are every time I learned a little more about this huge, beautiful, interesting, Awesome, and sometimes overwhelming world we call home.  My milestones are connected by airplanes and in-flight movies.  My milestones are full of foreign languages and culture shock and misunderstandings and souvenirs.  And my passport was there for all of them.

I really love my passport.

Still, I suppose a blank passport means a whole lot of new journeys, a whole lot of new milestones and realizations and adventures and heartbreaks.

I can only hope the next ten years are as Awesome as the last.