tourists

on my way to work this morning, my mind started down a track that i haven't been able to wander from yet. it was started while i was listening to the sarah slean song get home, and there is one line in the song that says, 'to me you're just a tourist...'

the song started me thinking that it is too easy for us to be tourists in our own lives. i, myself live like this with alarming frequency.

what is so wrong with being a tourist, you wonder? well, you are reading the words of someone who doesn't like to be considered a tourist even when she is in a foreign country. the best compliment i EVER received was on my first trip to paris, when i was crossing a street in the latin quarter one morning with this old woman who apparently saw something funny, and said something to me en francais, and was surprised when i couldn't answer her. ah, the good days...

...but i digress.

being a tourist, at least in my estimation, is cheap. you don't belong to the place where you are, you are just there to enjoy it, not make it better, not necessarily grow from it, to only get what you can from it. you may disagree with me, but i believe at the root of being a tourist is the consumerism that is so prevalent in and diseasing our culture. it is deliberately standing orbiting of the heart of a place, sampling the hors d'oerves, but never actually sitting down at the table .

in many ways i am more a tourist in my everyday life than i am when i am in france. i forget the things that make my life, and this place where i live great and beautiful and magical, in the face of the banalities of the every day...or worse than forget them, i take them for granted.

in the busyness of the days, how does one remember to live?