Have you ever sat on a beach and looked out into the sea? It makes you feel small, temporary. Almost as if, in the grand scheme of things, you are just passing by. It’s like the one hundred years we get are nowhere near enough, and the sea can sense this. It can tell our fear of being temporary, of being only human, of having too little time.

When we sit by it, in its grandeur and in its timelessness, we can feel history. We can feel the thousands of people who have sat before us in that very same place and looked at that very same sea.

And we can feel the thousands of people that will sit there even after us. And all the while, the sea will never leave its place.
It is not just the sea. Millions of things in this world will make you feel that way.

Even though there is some sadness in the feeling, there is hope in it, in being so connected to the world that it becomes a living part of you.

It seems we can finally, truly live only when we can admit that there are things greater than us, things that we need to learn, things that we need to experience.

There is this person inside me, this hidden adventurer, who secretly wishes she could roam the world, move countries every several years, find treasures, learn languages-a girl who can live like the wind.

I’m only dreaming of course; no one can live that way. We all need a home, a place to go back to, to be safe in, to be loved in.
But in our youth, it is ok to give things a chance, things that later we can’t do. That’s the beauty of the 20s; we are old enough to do whatever we want, and young enough not to think too much about it.

So, I will be spending next year studying abroad in Spain, hopefully that adventurer will have the best of luck and this will be just the beginning of my travels. If you really want to come along, I will be here every month, writing about what life throws at me.

And truthfully, if you also have an adventurer inside, if in a different century you would have liked to have been an explorer, and if in this century you are a lover of different culture, food, drink, music, life and if, most importantly, you are in your 20s and still aflame with that naive sense of adventure and you have a ready mind and an open heart, hop on the plane and go visit a sea somewhere in the world.

Dorotea Lechkova is a
sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, studying in Madrid, Spain.